When you send your work, do you worry whether you’ve caught all the typos?
They can be hard to spot.
But whether you are writing a press release, an internal report, social media posts or an email, those mistakes can cause confusion, delay, and embarrassment and lead others to form a low opinion of you and your organisation.
So, how can you improve your editing and proofreading abilities and catch the errors?
Here are seven tips from our business writing skills training and our online How to write engaging content course.
Give it time
You may not always have the luxury of time in your business writing.
But where you do, use it.
I find far more mistakes in my work the longer I leave the gap between writing and proofing.
Make a cup of tea. Stretch your legs. Move on to the next item on your ‘to-do’ list. Or make that phone call you’ve been putting off.
I like to leave my writing overnight and proof it the next day with fresh eyes.
But even a short break can help.
Mix it up
To avoid word blindness when proofing, you need to make your work look different.
Consider putting your words into a different font and size. You could even put it into a different colour.
These are all excellent ways of removing the familiarity of the words, tricking your brain into thinking it is reading something new, and spotting the errors.
My preferred way of ‘mixing it up’, is to print out what I have written, especially when it is long-form content or a complicated subject, and read it on paper.
People tend to read differently on paper compared to a screen and pay closer attention to detail.
Spend time going through your work on paper and only return to the computer screen when you have completed the proofing – if you continually flick between paper and screen whenever you find an error, you will miss mistakes.
Read aloud
And once you’ve printed your work out, why not read it aloud.
Ok, this one takes a bit of courage in a crowded office.
But many of us work from home for at least part of the week. And you can always use a breakout space if you are in the office.
Reading your text aloud will help you find more errors, especially grammar. If you find you haven’t taken a breath for a while, for example, you need to break the text up.
It also helps you spot those sentences that look good on paper but don’t quite flow when you read them. If you have to re-read a sentence, fall over your words or get your tongue-tied, you may need to tweak that section.
The other great benefit of reading aloud, in my experience, is it makes you more likely to find the repetition. This can be one of the trickiest parts of proofreading, and repeating words can sneak past multiple checks.
But I tend to spot more of them through reading aloud. For example, while writing this blog, I read aloud one that was about to be published and noticed I had ‘impact’ and ‘impacting’ in the same sentence.
Our business writing skills courses are bespoke, devised by business professionals, copywriting experts and journalists to meet your needs and requirements. And they are delivered by people who use the right words every day to inform, educate, entertain and grab attention – current working journalists.
Know your errors
The more proofreading you do, the more familiar you become with your most common errors.
You get to know what to look out for.
For example, I tend to miss the r off ‘your’, and I sometimes leave the s off the end of plurals, turning them into singulars.
If I’m rushing, I can also write ‘are’ instead of ‘our’. ‘You’re’ and ‘your’ errors can also creep into the copy.
Because I’m aware of these issues, I know I must pay closer attention to them.
Embrace the technology
There are plenty of tools out there that make it easier to spot your errors and improve your business writing skills.
Grammarly is an AI-assisted writing assistant that spots spelling and punctuation mistakes.
It is an easy way of adding another layer to your proofreading checks. And it works in Word and Outlook too.
But you do need to tread carefully. Although it is more dependable than the Word spellcheck, it misses errors, and some of its suggested amends can be baffling. So use common sense or do your own research before accepting them.
Another tool I like to use is the Hemmingway Editor. It is an excellent way of adding more polish to your writing.
I think of it as the gnarly newspaper sub-editor who has been doing the job for decades and knows how to make copy better even when there is nothing grammatically wrong.
The emphasis is on making writing short and punchy by highlighting complicated words, dull sentences, passive voice, and adverbs. Or, to put it more simply, cutting the fat.
And it is easy to use. If you see a yellow sentence, it needs to be shorter; if it is red, it is too complicated; purple means a simpler word could be used, and blue highlights adverbs and weak phrases.
I mentioned Word earlier, and it is worth pointing out it contains a couple of handy, lesser-known tools to help with your business writing skills.
The Flesch Reading Ease score uses the number of words in a sentence and the number of syllables in each word to calculate how easy it is to read a document. The lower the score, the more difficult the text is to read, You should aim for a score of between 60 and 70.
The second check, known as the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, is an equation that tells you how many years of education someone needs to understand your content.
The grade score is based on the American grade system, and you need to add five to your grade to find the reading age of your content.
To find your score, go to the ‘file’ menu, then ‘options’ and then on to the ‘proofing’ tab. Under the ‘when correcting spelling and grammar in Word’ heading, you need to tick the box which says, ‘show readability statistics’. Then when you run a spelling and grammar check, you will find the two readability scores.
Another pair of eyes
While this may not be necessary for every bit of writing, having another set of eyes check your work is a great safety net.
They will almost always spot something you have missed.
Three colleagues read this blog before it was published. So, I’m not solely to blame if you spot any mistakes in this blog about writing errors.
One final tip
Whether you are proofing it in your head or reading it aloud, read it slowly. Unnaturally slowly. Uncomfortably slowly. If you read it at your normal pace, your brain will self-correct any mistakes and you might miss something.
What next? If you need a hand, we run business writing skills training courses, and we can tailor them to your specific aims and needs.
If you need to improve your writing as part of your content marketing strategy, we also offer an online training option, available whenever and wherever you need it.
Media First are media and communications training specialists with more than 35 years of experience. We have a team of trainers, each with decades of experience working as journalists, presenters, communications coaches and media trainers.
Click here to find out more about our business writing skills training.
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