I know what you’re thinking – oh goody, here comes another
lecture about looking over your work.
Well…you’re right.
I encountered this recently when a reader of this blog discovered a mistake I made while writing a post. The ironic thing was that this post was about not having enough time to catch all the mistakes in my work. Had I been quicker on my feet, I’d have said that I was using irony at the end of my post to demonstrate my point, but truth is that I just didn’t catch it.
The reason for bringing this up is that so many of us rely on the normal spellchecking function of our computers and phones to catch mistakes. And they’re great…when you misspell a word that has no other spelling. However, oftentimes we’ll misspell something that’s actually the correct spelling of another word(just not the one we meant to use). For example, in the above mentioned post, I meant to use the word “like.” Unfortunately, what I wrote was the word “life.” And I was lazy in not checking, so it slipped through into a post.
In a blog post, it’s nothing catastrophic. Sure, it’s embarrassing, but it’s fixable. Imagine your horror if something like that slipped through everything in a novel you’re working on.
This is why proofreading, and then getting someone to copyedit your work, is so important. When you proofread, read your stuff out loud, no matter how silly you may feel. It’s real easy to zip right past a mistake like that when you’re silently reading it to yourself, but it gets much more noticeable when you say the words. Then go to copyediting(hard for a blog post, but a must for a novel). Having another person take a look will allow them to see mistakes that will slip by you, especially if your computer didn’t catch it.
Yes, this all sounds silly, but it helps separate amateurs from professionals. And don’t we all want to be professional. I been, don’t me?
(See – I can still be silly with my points)
I encountered this recently when a reader of this blog discovered a mistake I made while writing a post. The ironic thing was that this post was about not having enough time to catch all the mistakes in my work. Had I been quicker on my feet, I’d have said that I was using irony at the end of my post to demonstrate my point, but truth is that I just didn’t catch it.
The reason for bringing this up is that so many of us rely on the normal spellchecking function of our computers and phones to catch mistakes. And they’re great…when you misspell a word that has no other spelling. However, oftentimes we’ll misspell something that’s actually the correct spelling of another word(just not the one we meant to use). For example, in the above mentioned post, I meant to use the word “like.” Unfortunately, what I wrote was the word “life.” And I was lazy in not checking, so it slipped through into a post.
In a blog post, it’s nothing catastrophic. Sure, it’s embarrassing, but it’s fixable. Imagine your horror if something like that slipped through everything in a novel you’re working on.
This is why proofreading, and then getting someone to copyedit your work, is so important. When you proofread, read your stuff out loud, no matter how silly you may feel. It’s real easy to zip right past a mistake like that when you’re silently reading it to yourself, but it gets much more noticeable when you say the words. Then go to copyediting(hard for a blog post, but a must for a novel). Having another person take a look will allow them to see mistakes that will slip by you, especially if your computer didn’t catch it.
Yes, this all sounds silly, but it helps separate amateurs from professionals. And don’t we all want to be professional. I been, don’t me?
(See – I can still be silly with my points)
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