Friday, November 6, 2015

Proofread, proofread and proofread!


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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