Wednesday, February 3, 2010

May I please share...

...something that is becoming more prevalent? I have noticed more and more on product listings, magazine articles, advertisements, and other various written materials, typos and major grammatical errors. I am a trained secretary and I understand the difficulty of proofreading your own work, but some of these errors are easily caught.

Perhaps this is a personal pet peeve of mine (and I know the way things go for me - there's probably typos and grammatical errors as I vent), but I find that if I come across typos there's a feeling of unprofessionalism which tends to turn me off.

I am not perfect by any means and do welcome being critiqued. I just feel that it's important to proofread and make necessary corrections in order to be taken seriously.

Here's a tip to proofread your own material:

Proofread backwards. Begin at the end and work back through the paper paragraph by paragraph or even line by line. This will force you to look at the surface elements rather than the meaning of the paper.

Phew!!! Thanks for letting me get that off my shoulders!

4 comments:

Kristine Mullen said...

I agree. I can't help but wonder if some of the issues are with too much texting and shortening of words.

~Kristine

The Farmer's Attic said...

Ah - you may be onto something! Didn't even consider that as a possibility!

Candy said...

Big personal pet peeve for me. I have a boss who miss spells very simple words that the rest of our office can see daily. Spell check isn't that hard to figure out. My boss is young and doesn't realize how this reflects our dept.

Valley Primitives Gift Shoppe said...

That's a good tip that I've never heard of. Thanks for sharing. :0)
Kim