By: Cole Buergi, VP of Business Development, Leonard & Finco Public Relations
I’m always amazed at the number of documents I see that are
riddled with mistakes. It’s just about everywhere you go now days. Whether it’s
at the bank, a restaurant or online, people are getting very sloppy in their
writing.
These errors include misspelled words, multiple font styles
and sizes in the same document (which by-the-way screams copy and paste), and formatting
that lacks any kind of formalized layout (which screams LAZY).
I’m far from a perfectionist, but there’s really no excuse
for it. Today’s computers have taken nearly all of the guesswork out of
proofreading and it’s really easy to highlight copy to see if it’s the same
font style and size. And as for layout, you should be able to look at it and
see that it just doesn’t look right.
I don’t have any hard evidence but it seems that these mistakes
are made more often by the younger generations. I find that odd since they’ve
had auto-correct since they were born as well as access to every word ever
known to mankind at their fingertips. When I was a child, if I wanted to know
how to spell something, I had to get out a dictionary about eight inches thick
and look it up. With today’s technology, you just have to type how you think
it’s spelled and let autocorrect do its thing. At least, most of the time that
works.
Yes, I do make mistakes periodically. For some reason that I
can’t explain, I frequently type “your” when I mean “you’re” and vice versa. I
know the difference and will even think the correct spelling while typing. The
problem is my fingers just don’t cooperate with me.
So the next time YOU’RE going to send a document you’ve
developed to someone else, take a few extra minutes and read it out loud to
yourself. You’ll be surprised by the errors you will catch and correct.
Do you have any tricks to help you find writing errors? If
so, please share.
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