Tag Archives: proofreading

Five embarrassing typos to avoid at all costs

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WHEN WE WRITE quickly with the intention of publishing or emailing our work ‘yesterday’, there is a real danger of inserting a mistake that we would not ordinarily make. Consequently, these mistakes have the effect of making us look like we don’t know our stuff. These are generally basic errors that could have been averted if we’d taken more care.

Quite worryingly for a small business, these sorts of mistakes can cost you new customers. While pedants are often irritating, small businesses and sole traders should not discount these people as potential clients!

Here are five mistakes it would be worth your while to avoid making.

The hurried three-letter word: We type the words ‘the’ and ‘and’ so regularly that we can become blind to the fact their characters are easily transposed. It’s always embarrassing to see when you’ve accidentally published ‘hte’ or ‘adn’. You may be lucky enough to have turned on your spell-checker, in which case these two words should auto-correct. But you should be reluctant to fall back on such a facility. Not all smart devices or apps have this built in. Proofreading will be your only friend!

The missed vowel: It’s all too easy to think you’ve typed a double letter (such as in too) only to find later on that you wrote ‘to’ by mistake. It’s especially easy to do if you’ve got a sticky keyboard or are using a smart device with a fast touch keypad. Auto-correct facilities on smart devices aren’t always tuned in to grammar, so the upshot is they may choose the wrong form of a word for you. Our advice is to read over what you’ve done carefully before hitting that send or publish button.

The missed consonant: Getting your vowels right is essential, but consonants are just as important. In fact, missed consonants can prove incredibly dangerous to your business. Leaving out certain letters will result in a different word being created than you intended, perhaps to great (but embarrassing) comical effect. Can you imagine a serious newspaper article describing the actions of a violent criminal, only to see in print that he has been described as a violet criminal?  Now imagine this kind of error writ large in the newspaper’s headline – an action liable to win it a spot on the satirical TV show Have I Got News for You. Now imagine such an error slipping through in your own business communications – your emails, leaflets, brochures etc. Not only will it cause unintended amusement, but you’ll probably have spent good money on the print run too.

The jumbled word: Another tricky and oft repeated mistake that your spell-checker won’t find is what I call the jumbled word. Let’s say you meant to write ‘Please fill in this form’. Later on you realise you wrote ‘Please fill in this from’ instead. Doh! There are so many words in the English language that use the same letters in a different order – we really do need to be vigilant. Here’s an even more embarrassing example. ‘John’s new brassiere is being opened tonight by a surprise celebrity guest’. The word should of course have been brasserie. I’ve seen this happen in print more times than I care to mention. If you’re opening a little bistro soon, pay very close attention indeed to your marketing material. The same applies if you’re opening a new underwear shop. You don’t want people trying to book tables for two in confusion.

The problem with public…: The problem with the word public, when you’re typing or reading very quickly, is that the letter L can become invisible very, very easily. I won’t spell this out in full to you. Simply look at the word public and imagine what word is created instead if you remove that L. Don’t fall foul if you can possibly help it!

Shudder people, and take note. Proofreading is very important to your business communications.

Perfect proofreading: part two

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LAST WEEK I uploaded a post containing my first five tips for perfect proofreading. It really is possible to publish and print great content if you take the time to look for the most common errors. Here are my final five tips for achieving this.

6 – Look for inconsistency. Have you used capital letters throughout your document, not just as the start of sentences? If so, have you used them consistently? Same goes for numbers. Do you use a mixture of numerals and words, ie. Ten or 10. What about bullet points? Have you used a mixture of numbers and blobs? It doesn’t matter what you choose, as long as you only use the one style throughout your document.

7 – Punctuation. Are there full stops where they are needed? What about quotation marks, question marks, commas? The placing of a comma can change the meaning of a sentence, so be careful where you put them. Reading your document aloud can help you to work out where the emphasis of punctuation ought to be.

8 – Have a break. If your document is long, you will tire of looking for mistakes and stop being able to spot them. Do it the next day if you have time.

9 – Read your work backwards. This might seem odd, but reading from the end of the document to the beginning can help some people spot spelling errors more easily, because you’re not anticipating the word order or the flow of a sentence.

10 – Ask someone else to read your document. If only for the sake of a second pair of eyes when you’re tired and on a deadline. We all have different strengths and abilities to spot errors. Someone good at maths might spot an error where you have used numbers. Some people have great awareness of space, and might spot an extra return or indent where there shouldn’t be one. Someone might be good with names, and able to spot an inconsistency, ie. Ann or Anne.

And that’s really all there is to it! Best of all, if you take your time and check all the elements outlined above, you will eventually acquire the confidence you need to get things right every time.

Perfect proofreading: part one

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HAVE YOU EVER looked back at work you’ve done and wondered just how it ended up with so many mistakes in it? Do you always discover these errors when it’s too late, and you’ve already sent out your customer email or sent your leaflet to be printed 5,000 times? If this is the case, then you’ve come to the right place for some tips on improving your work. All it takes is a little time and patience. Here are our first five tips. A second part follows next week:

1 – Print out your document on A4 paper. Include a 2cm margin all round, and in double line spacing. Use a font that is easy to read, and isn’t elaborate (such as this one, which is Arial). The idea is to make the page as plain and simple as possible for reading. Print in black.

2 – Read through once without making any marks. You’re looking to make a mental note of any ‘red flags’ that come up as you read.

3 – Choose a contrasting coloured pen to make your corrections. Mark it so that you can see clearly what you’re doing and will understand your marks when you come back to them later.

4 – Go through your document line by line at a slowish pace. Pause at the end of each line. Does it make sense? If you need to read a line multiple times to understand it, it’s an indication that there is something amiss. Make a mark to come back to it later. This is not the time to rewrite that line.

5 – It’s time to target spelling. Don’t rely on a built-in spell checker. For a start it may default to USA English, which has some marked differences to UK English. If a word strikes you as oddly spelt, look it up, using a hard copy or online dictionary. Is it the correct form of the word – ie. Too, to or two? See our other tips section online for help in this area.