If You Didn’t Proof, I’m Not Reading

I live in a small town with a small town newspaper. When I was growing up, it was much, much smaller. And the newspaper was too. And much less professional.

Every evening after dinner, we used to play a game to see who could find the most mistakes. We used to laugh hysterically over some of the mistakes - until one day they printed my father’s obituary. My father was a rather well known businessman and they printed the obituary on the front page. His last name was Coon. In the headline, there was a typo - Goon and they did it again a few times in the body of the article. It actually brought some levity to a very sad time but there has always been a part of me that was hurt. My father did a lot for our small town in the 60’s and 70’s. You’d think they could at least spell his name correctly.

Today our newspaper has grown up with the town and it’s quite possible that it is much better than it used to be. I wouldn’t know. After learning how to spell with our evening recreational activity, I lost respect for it. And with the faux pas of misspelling my father’s name, they truly lost any hope of recovering me as a reader (I understand the editor still cries himself to sleep over this).

Last night I was reading a new blog that had been recommended to me. It actually looks like a good site (no, I’m not telling you who it is!) but I won’t ever read it and I won’t ever recommend it. Bummer because it could have been a good affiliate opportunity.

Why? Because I found several misspellings and typos. They were the kind that Word doesn’t find when you run spell-check - no instead of know, there instead of their, for example. Now I find myself wondering if they are as careless in servicing their customers. And now I don’t trust them.

I realize that we all miss some of these errors some of the time but there were quite a few. Plus the posts I was reading were part of a series so presumably the work was researched and drafted, proofed and edited. I hope that someone other than the author also reviewed it. It’s difficult to find your own mistakes because you are too familiar with your own work. And as I observed before, spell and grammar checkers don’t always catch these errors.

So please, please, please! Proof your writing carefully and enlist the aid of a colleague, friend or some other trusted source to proof it. Another set of (unbiased) eyes is crucial.

Now I am quaking in my shoes that my words will come back to haunt me as you now go through my blog looking for mistakes. But then again, if it motivates you to go through my blog maybe it’s not a bad thing! If you do find mistakes, I ask you to let me know via my Contact form. And I humbly beg your forgiveness.

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