I just finished a paper and I really don't think I can ever read it again...

Has anyone felt like this? Why is this happening? : /

I hate reading my own work. When I'm reasonably happy I've covered all the relevant content I usually just skim it for spelling and grammar errors before getting my supervisor to read it. Whenever I do read my work I get hyper critical of it even though I've been told several times by my sup that my writing is of a high standard.

Don't look at it for a couple of days and clear your head or work on something else then go back to it with fresh eyes, might make it less painful.

I suppose most people here are native English speakers. I am not. It is more difficult for me/us to read our own English writing which is my supervisor always complain about. A good writing could be more important than the your results/methodology. I encourage you to read them as much as you could, debug all language issue, e.g. grammar, spelling, re-paragraph, etc. . You will be rewarded by this exercise. If your supervisor see a piece of clear and concise text, I believe he is happy to discuss more academic issues with you.

I had to read a couple of papers back during preparation of further papers.

One could have been sigificantly shorter. Also, I found a minor typo in a couple of earlier papers (for scientist types, I mixed up atomic percent and weight percent with SEM / EDX data). The findings of the papers wern't affected, however. Anyone worth their salt should spot the error (though the paper referees missed it), worth a smile at most rather than a critical error in findings.

It's sometimes better not to read back after the fact unless you have to, as you start wondering what other mistakes you might have made. :-)

I am a native English speaker and even we make mistakes. :-)

Ian (Mackem_Beefy)

Those who have written 1000+ paper normally do not write any single word. I saw a couple of invited papers in my field which even the manuscript is not prepared by the solo author himself/herself, but the students. The author only acknowledged this, not list these poor students as co-authors.