GrammarPhile Blog

If you use email as part of your job, you know what a pain it can be to sort through the daily onslaught. Endless “Re: re: re: re:” chains are just the tip of the iceberg – it just gets worse from there.

But here’s the important point: Everyone you email is in the same situation, and some of the messages they deem unimportant might be the ones you send. How do you get around that? How can you ensure that your message gets seen and understood by the intended recipients?

Many business disputes stem from misaligned expectations: Each party thinks it understands what should result from an agreed-upon transaction, but the results leave one or both parties unsatisfied. Proofreading is no exception, which is why it’s important to know going in what you can expect from your editors – and what you can’t.

Most businesses have produced a lot of content across a wide variety of channels. Between social media, blogs and website content, it’s difficult to keep track of everything that’s out there. It’s important to remember that the value and appearance of your content are a direct reflection of your business and can significantly impact your reputation.

If you’ve ever had someone else edit your writing, you probably know the feeling: The draft you receive from the proofreaders no longer has any spelling or grammatical errors – but it also bears little resemblance to what you wrote. Your voice, in other words, has been stripped out.

Many ProofreadNOW.com customers are former do-it-yourselfers, commonly citing at least one of the following reasons for not outsourcing their proofreading:

• We save money by doing it in-house. Outsourcing is way too expensive.
• We can turn documents around much more quickly in-house without wasting time waiting to get proofread documents back from an agency.
• Our style/subject matter/process is complicated. We need to keep our documents in-house for quality control, because no outside editor/proofreader could conform to our standards.

Who says you’re too old to trick-or-treat? This week, we offer 8 tricks to help you become a better proofreader, along with a few treats at the end for those who proofread marketing, legal or medical copy.

Not all of these techniques will work for everyone, and they won’t work in all instances. Much will depend on the length and complexity of the text, the time available for proofreading and what works for you individually. I use some of these tricks regularly and others not at all. Give them a try with your next document and see what works for you. 

Thanks to everyone who took our proofreading quiz last week. Congratulations to Arlene Gregoire, who missed just three of the 51 errors, including some of the sneakiest ones.

The mistakes that tripped up most people appeared in the second and third sentences of paragraph 3: decreases/increases insulin and hyper/hypoglycemic. These errors go beyond basic grammar and punctuation mistakes, many of which Microsoft Word will highlight, and require a closer read to ensure the text makes sense.

We edit a fair number of large documents, often put together by multiple people or teams. Each project has its idiosyncrasies, but a common problem among nearly all of them is a lack of consistency, stemming from different:

• Writing styles
• Page layout/structure
• Graphics formatting/style
• Heading and text styles
• Word choice/usage
• Mechanics (punctuation and, particularly, capitalization)

Thanks to everyone who entered our proofreading quiz last week. Congratulations to Barb Poole, who submitted both the first and the winning entry, missing just four of the 57 errors — even some of the sneaky ones.

The two mistakes that tripped up most people both appeared in paragraph 4: “airways” and “vaccine.” Regarding the first, we have only one airway, which is the area in the throat through which air passes to and from the lungs. The second word should be “vaccination.” Vaccine is the product; vaccination is the process. Consumers can’t “get” a vaccine other than through vaccination, so “vaccination” is the correct term here.

Now for the rest of the answers …

It’s standard testing time for many schools. But why should students have all the fun? In honor of National Grammar Day on March 4 and National Proofreading Day on March 8, we’re giving you the opportunity to assess your proofreading skills with a little quiz.

We’ve laced the five numbered paragraphs below with errors, some obvious and some a bit sneaky. But they’re all unequivocally wrong. Acceptable variations — such as words with different spellings (e.g., advisor, adviser) or sentences that could be punctuated multiple ways — are not included here.

The figures in parentheses indicate the number of mistakes in each paragraph. Indicate how you would correct the following by providing a corrected version, or do like our editors do and use Word’s Track Changes and Comments features: