How you write for your business matters.

Proof, Proof, Proofread Your Blog

As we use increasingly quicker, shorter and more casual forms of communication in the new social media sphere,  it’s easy to become more lax about those pesky rules of grammar and punctuation. In fact, on Twitter, you often abandon many rules to get your point across in 140 characters or less. We shoot out an e-mail only to realize after the fact that we’ve misspelled or omitted a word.

Many small business owners haven’t really written a blog, letter or testimonial in so long that some of the pesky rules can be hard to remember. I’m not proud to admit that I fall in that rusty-on-the-rules category at times. I have been known to overuse commas like a comma addict. Others throw quotation marks around things that really don’t need them. In fact there is an entire blog dedicated to this, and it’s pretty funny. Joe’s endlessly annoyed by the common error of using it’s (it is) instead of its where appropriate. I’ve been guilty of that one, too.

How you write your blog, or for social media in general, is a reflection of your business and you as a professional. Marketing guru Seth Godin puts it succinctly in this post on his blog. Everything that you write, even an e-mail, should reflect well on you and your organization. Joe and I were mortified when a woman he formerly worked with sent an e-mail to her colleagues AND clients which read: “Please call me at this number today. My cell phone is broke”.

“IS BROKE”? Yikes!

Here are 5 tips I use to proofread my work:

1. Merriam-Webster offers both a dictionary and a thesaurus. It’s a great tool for double-checking on proper spelling, tense and usage of words, as well as finding an alternative to a word you feel you are using too much.
2. Use a fresh set of eyes. I often hand a draft of a blog to Joe.  He’ll usually find a mistake I’ve missed. The fresh eyes can be your own, too. After banging away on the keyboard for an hour, walk away. After a break you likely will find errors that you’d overlooked.
3. Read aloud. I learned this tip in a creative writing class in college, and I wish I had learned it years before. I know it sounds strange, but I catch so many typos, syntax errors and more when I read aloud what I’ve just written. Try it.
4. Grammar Girl is a content-rich but completely friendly site. It’s a great place to go when you’re not sure if you need a comma, semi-colon or period. Also available online, is Strunk’s Elements of Style. It’s a classic style guide. Although some rules are a a bit out-of-date,  I still consider it a go-to.
5. Print a copy. Reading copy on a screen is very different from reading it on a piece of paper. Sometimes easily missed typos are glaringly apparent on the page. So print it out,  grab a red pen and mark away.