Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Your spellcheck just bounced: three tips for copy editing

Copy editing is a tough business, you have to know every grammar rule there is or suffer the wrath of hundred of e-mails flooding your inbox warning you of the obviously misplaced comma in your article.

Sometimes it's worse than just a missing comma though, sometimes one typo can give your message an entirely different feel.

The Public Relations department for Rick Santorum will back me up on this.  A recent e-mail went out with one missing letter in the subject line, and yet it changes the entire tone of the message.


Usually, when there is a minor typo somewhere in your press release or your e-mail , you can simply resend a corrected e-mail and include something like UPDATE: or (use this copy) in the subject line.  This typo was not so fortunate, it quickly appeared on social media sites and then spread to news sites.

This unfortunate gem has also been making its way around the social media circuit.

Both of these mistakes can be avoided in the future with three simple tips.

Three simple tips for safe copy editing

1.  Read your story backwards.  It can be easy to read over a typo when you're reading a sentence because your mind will fix it for you.  You know what the sentence is suppose to say, such as:
Mary had a
a little lamb
When you first read the sentence, it can be very easy to miss that there are actually two a's.  If you read the words backwards one at a time, the a's stand out like a sore thumb. Spellchecker is a great tool, but it only catches words that aren't actually words.  Pubic is a real word, spellchecker won't catch that you meant to say public instead. If you start and the end of the story and read backwards, these kinds of words stand out like a sore thumb and can save you a lot of embarrassment.

2.  Read something else.  When you write a story or a press release, you know what it's about so it makes sense to you.  It can be heard to see it through the eyes of your readership. Step away from the computer for a minute, pull a book off a shelf and read a chapter.  This will help you come back to your writing with fresh eyes and help you see the parts that aren't explained well enough or that might be confusing to your readership. 

3.  Do the math.  I can almost hear the collective groan.  I know a lot of people who thought that once they got out of high school, they would never have to do math again.  If your article has a pie chart, percentages, places or any other quantitative mathematical numbers, take a pen and paper and make sure everything adds up.  Just like a spelling error, a math error can take the focus away from your message.


3 comments:

  1. Funny on Santorum!
    I think the "Mississippi" gaffe could be caused by wishful thinking. You know how it is when you're laying out a page. You just want that headline to fit! And you keep typing the words over again. Miraculously, it fits . . . without out those pesky crooked letters :)

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  2. What paper ran the Mississippi story? AP rules allow AP members to write their own title and edit the story as needed, so it might not have been the AP even though their name was attached to it.

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  3. That's true, it's the newspapers fault for the headline, not AP. I'll adjust the post.

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