Dress your writing in its best before sending it out the door

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Leila Kalmbach to the Rule of Three guest stage.  Leila is a freelance copyeditor, proofreader, and writer.  She produces an excellent newsletter called Typo of the Month, which tells the story of a different embarrassing or expensive typo each month.  Please e-mail Leila directly to sign up for Typo of the Month.  Leila can be found online at www.eyeforink.com, or reached at eye.for.ink@gmail.com.

                                                                                                                                           

When you were little, you were taught not to judge a book by its cover. But you do it anyway, don’t you? We all do. That’s why you wear a business suit when you want to be seen as a professional, a slinky dress when you go to the bar with friends, and an old ratty T-shirt when you’re home alone with no one to see you.

Okay, maybe you don’t do all of those things. But you see my point: You make judgments based on surface details, and you expect others to also.

And yet, when submitting a piece of writing to an editor, publisher, or agent, many people don’t bother proofreading their work. They figure it’ll get proofread before it’s published. They figure these people are trained to look past surface errors and see that the story is well-crafted, the sentences are alluring, and the words pop out from the page.

And maybe they will—but don’t count on it. The surface details of spelling, grammar, and punctuation are like the business suit for your writing. They show the reader that you pay attention to detail, and they allow the reader to get truly lost in your writing. After all, it’s hard to pay attention to the message when you’re caught up in figuring out whether that comma should have been a period, or whether “invenst” should say “invest” or “invent.” In that way, your writing itself is seen as stronger when it’s free of typos even though the content is exactly the same.

With that in mind, I offer these tips for proofreading your work:

-Spend some time away from a piece before proofreading it. When you know what a sentence is supposed to say, your mind doesn’t spend as much time processing the words. This makes it easy to overlook errors.

-Read through the piece slowly, at a time when you feel awake and alert. Reading it out loud may help you to slow down and really look at the words.

-Try to turn off the part of your brain that focuses on meaning, and just focus on the surface details.

-Keep your eye moving steadily by keeping your place on the page with a pen or pencil. When we read, we don’t actually look at every word. Our eyes skip over words and our minds fill in the blanks based on what we expect to see. This is why typos are sometimes hard to catch. Make sure you read every single word, especially very short ones, which our eyes skip over most often.

-If possible, get a friend to read the piece as well.

If you have a piece that really needs to be perfect, consider hiring an editor to proofread or copyedit it. Different style guides have different rules, and a good editor can give you a leg up by putting your piece in the style used by the publication you’re targeting.

Remember, we all judge books by their covers. If you don’t pay attention to typos in your writing, your own book may never get the opportunity to be judged by its cover in bookstores around the world.