I know, it sounds very obvious, but proofreading your work is extremely important. Here are a few quick tips that I’d like to pass along to you all.
First and foremost, use a spell checking program. I personally use Microsoft Word when editing product reviews and articles for my tech site. It only takes a minute or two to run a document through Word, so there is really no excuse not to.
Second, get someone else (two people if possible) to read over your work before posting it. I can remember back in high school when my English teachers would always tell me to read back over my essay to check for errors. Now, I don’t know about you, but for me, it is nearly impossible to edit my own work… not because I don’t want to, but simply because if I made a mistake the first time, odds are I will pass right over it the second time as well. Having a friend or two that can look over your work will help you to catch errors that you did not catch.
So why do I put so much emphasis on proofreading? Well, think about it. You only have one shot to make a good first impression. If someone reads one of your articles and it is full of errors, you have just instantly degraded your integrity. People will tend to not take you as seriously if they see that you haven’t even mastered the basics of the English language.
For example, I am a member of a popular college sports website (I pay a monthly fee even). The site offers some really good articles on Ole Miss football, but I can’t help but notice that nearly every one of their articles have at least 2-3 spelling / grammar errors. I could understand if this was a single person writing these articles on his/her blog, but this is a very large site with several thousand members! I even e-mailed the editor about this and offered to help proofread their stuff before it goes live. I never received a reply.
Now, don’t get me wrong… nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes, and at times, errors will still slip through regardless of how much proofreading is done. The difference here is one or two stray errors vs. every single article having a handful of mistakes.
