Avoid Embarrassing Glitches: Proofread Your Documents
Have you ever sent a critical email to your customer or a proposal to top management, and noticed too late that you wrote recieve instead of receive? Of course, you know the rule is i before e except after c, but somehow both the misspelled word and the rule escaped you as you finalized your document. Typos are almost human in their ability to lie in wait to trap you. Even if you type correctly, autocorrect often seems determined to turn the text into something embarrassing.
To avoid the kinds of errors highlighted in this humorous video, it’s advisable to proofread. If it’s your own writing you’re proofreading rather than a friend’s or colleague’s, try to leave some time between writing and proofing. A half-hour is fine; a day or more is ideal. Without that timeout, there’s a tendency to see what you think you wrote, thereby missing the glitches and goofs.
It’s also a good idea to print out your document before proofreading, or at least a few pages of it if it’s long. With more than a screen’s worth of text in front of you, you’re more likely to notice that you repeated an idea, a story, or an attention-getting multisyllabic word.
Scan your document for homonyms—words that sound similar but are spelled differently. When I first wrote the previous sentence, I wrote your as you’re; I often do the same thing with to andtwo and with they’re and their. Other words commonly switched include assent and ascent, than andthen, and principle and principal. And of course, its and it’s, which is a very common error. Spellcheck won’t help you find these errors; you’ve got to do the searching yourself.
If you read your document out loud, you’re more likely to notice what’s actually there rather than your recollection of what you wrote. Reading out loud saved me the time I wrote that I’m an experienced junkie when I meant an experience junkie. Whew! Another helpful trick is to read the text from right to left or even from the end to the beginning. Doing this helps you look at the individual words apart from their meaning.
A final tip: Watch out for anything called a rule unless you also pay attention to the exceptions. It turns out that the rule I mentioned above about i before e except after c is true except when it’s not. Consider, for example, feisty, heist, science, and species. In proofreading, beware the exceptions.
