Proofreading is Your Friend

PROOFREAD, PROOFREAD, PROOFREAD


I know this is the internet, and grammar and punctuation, and basic communication skills, like proper spelling, are sometimes woefully lacking in the things people choose to post. It’s just for entertainment, and who cares about proper spelling and grammar. This is true in most cases, but when you’re publishing something to your blog, or an article, or an ad page, would it be too much to ask to proofread what you're writing, use proper grammar and run the spellcheck? If you're chatting with your buddies in IMs or chattng casually in a group or forum, it's not such an issue, but in any kind of writing where you're attempting to sell something or teach someone something, taking the time to proof read and spell-check will go a long way in making the difference between people thinking of you as a real writer, a wannabe, or worse, a complete idiot. I know it's nitpicky, but it's a pet peeve of mine, and I know I'm not the only one. I'm not perfect, by any means, and even I am bad about not proofreading sometimes. When I go back and read some of the things I’ve posted, I see glaring typos, and I cringe! Let's review! It's "Let's go there", not "Let's go their". Their is possessive, there is a destination. It's "we were going", not "we was going". Read over what you write before you hit the send button. I read an article the other day by a woman who said she was a technical writer and made so many thousands of dollars in her job, and there were several typos and instances where she used the wrong word. She had obviously gone back and changed something in the article, but didn’t proof read after the change to be sure it made sense. I thought to myself that I hope she has an editor for her professional work. Even though she is probably great at her job, the errors in her article lowered my perception of the value of what she was saying. I know I'm not the only one who thinks this way. It's about image. Do you want people to think you know what you're talking about and are well-educated, or some hack spitting out garbage? To be fair, I know English is not the native language of many who publish online, and a lot of errors are inevitable and forgiveable in those cases, but for the American and English-speaking world, not so much.

I'm not suggesting that you should always use completely proper English and be absolutely perfect in your punctuation, etc. You have to write in your own style, in your own voice, and be real and connect with your readers. In some instances, your blog for example, it's perfectly fine to say "gonna" and start your sentences with but or and (even though it's wrong), and end your sentences with a preposition on occasion. Just be sure you spell the preposition right (not write) and that your sentences make sense. Spell checkers are your friend, and you should learn to use them! This will ensure you won’t end up with a post like this one I found on freelancing.

I was going to put the link to the blog so you could see the whole article, but it's a splog, so I won't. Maybe it doesn’t much matter what the article says, since it’s obviously only there for content purposes to pull in traffic for their Design Quote affiliate program links, but even splogs should be readable. The beginning of the article starts out great, with helpful, pertinent information on how to increase your freelancing income and manage being a freelancer.. but the end is where it goes horribly wrong..

This is what it says
Freelance Writers: Double Your Income

“Double your income by effort earnest most your business. Yes, if you impact as a worker writer, you are streaming a business. And as a business, you requirement to verify things seriously. Can you rattling threefold your income? Of instruction you can. Just ingest your instance more expeditiously and intend more and better-paying clients. We every undergo we hit likewise some life when we don’t intend as such impact finished as we should. That’s dustlike if you poverty to analyse yourself as a unaccompanied ‘artiste’ struggling with writer’s block. But it won’t revilement the condiment if you analyse what you do as a earnest business. Use your instance efficiently. Get the impact done. And encourage your services. If you are genuinely likewise unsure to garner up the sound or intercommunicate in face of a crowd, at small ingest your composition skills and create a promotional income collection you crapper beam discover to likely clients. And here’s the easiest artefact to threefold your income: intend meliorate clients and discuss higher fees. In fact, the meliorate the calibre of client, the more unstoppered they module be to negotiation, and the more they module knowledge your work...

and it goes on from there..

What’s up with that?? It looks like they may have used one of those article spinner programs that they claim will re-word your articles for you to make them different enough that you can submit them to several different places without duplicate content. Maybe it was one of those that you plug in your keywords and basic ideas and it writes the article for you. Whichever it was, the software, apparently, has a few bugs that need to be worked out.. and the poster needs to learn to proofread before he/she publishes. LOL

The point is, if you’re going to write things and publish them for the world to read, take 2 minutes of your time and proofread and spell check, so you don’t end up publishing things that look like the article above. You may think that noone cares, and maybe a lot of people don't, and are only interested in the information and ideas, and not so much how well you can write, but a lot of people do care. They will judge you on not only what you say, but how well you say it, and judge your business in the same way.