Pay attention, and you will find typos that have slipped through the cracks in newspapers, advertisements, websites and more. Their prevalence doesn’t make them any less damaging. If sloppy mistakes consistently mar your communications, they will affect the public perception of your business.
Consider these ideas to streamline your editing process and eliminate errors.
Photo by Seth Sawyers
1. Standardize. Organize a team that will review materials to be published, whether online or in print. Assign any special tasks, such as looking up disputed words and fact-checking. Create a system for tracking each person’s comments. Put one person in charge of the master document and have them input the changes and moderate conflicting edits. Clarify who has the final sign-off on materials before they are published.
2. Consult resources. Keep your preferred stylebook handy, as well as your brand stylebook and a dictionary. Use spell check but do not rely on it — “there,” “their,” and “they’re” are all spelled correctly, but only one is right in any given circumstance.
3. Keep clear document records. Save past revisions of each material in a separate folder from the current version. Label the most up-to-date document clearly to avoid any confusion. Do the same with your company’s boilerplate information if it has changed over time. Always draw from the current document, rather than past materials, to ensure that you use the correct information.
4. Print it out, change it up. It is generally easier to catch typos on paper than on a screen, and printing a document can also reveal formatting errors. Even reading a document in a different format, such as a preview version of a blog post, can be helpful.
5. Step away, view it from a different direction. If you’ve been staring at the same document for a while, you are probably skimming it. Take a moment to step back and take a short break or work on something else for a while. When you come back to the piece you will be more likely to notice any errors. If you’re proofreading a long document, give it a second look beginning with the last page and working forward. This will give you a chance to catch any mistakes you missed because you got tired as you were reading.
A little preparation can go a long way toward improving your communications process and product. For more editing strategies, read our post on removing redundancy from your writing.
