monkeys writing Hamlet process in reverse

Books Suw has been working on (in other words helping with) some public domain software to aid the proofreading of manuscripts. Essentially it's the monkeys writing Hamlet process in reverse, with the monkeys being being a manuscript a line at a time out of context and asked to search for mistakes. As Suw says:

"The first thing we’ve focused on is how to proofread a manuscript for typos. The problem with reading a whole book all at once and looking for typos is that you can get so caught up in reading that your brain starts to skip the mistakes, seeing what it thinks should be there instead of what actually is. But what if you were presented with just one sentence at a time? You’d lack some context, it’s true, but you don’t really need a lot of context to know if “teh” is a misspelling of “the” or that “their” should be “there”.

One of the problems I've always had with reports and essays are typos and a general inability to spot them in a crowd of words. I've always thought it was my problem, genuine carelessness. The comments for both of my dissertations essentially said: "Great piece of work. Pity about all of the typos." Now I know that it's something that everyone wrestles with.

Book Oven sounds like a godsend, and having tried it out for a while is easy to use a oddly addictive as you read through each sentence testing your own ability to spot grammar and spelling. It could also have the effect of improving your own writing too as you slowly, through osmosis, become aware of the mistakes which can happen when typing large blocks of text.