When I was in the seventh grade, I took a typing class. Twenty-five kids sat clacking away at typewriters, all wondering when we’d ever need these skills in life. One day, a girl across the room passed me a slightly crumpled piece of typing paper, folded into quarters. I opened the note to see a typewritten message that read something like this:
Dug,
I think your cute.I lik you. do you lik me?
Kim
A wave of cognitive dissonance followed. As a thirteen-year-old boy, there was the thrill of a girl taking interest in me, no matter how unattractive I found her to be. But the excitement deflated like yesterday’s birthday balloons as soon as I read my name at the top of the page: “Dug.” This girl had a crush on me, but didn’t know how to spell my name. The rest of it was equally consternating. The misspellings made me form a very low opinion of her, as well as the grammatical mistakes. Some of it could probably be accounted for by an unfamiliarity with a typewriter. Some of it may have been due to the nerve-racking adrenaline rush of banging out a note to a boy in a hurry before the teacher walked past to inspect her work. Or, maybe she was just dumb.
I struggle with these questions to this day as I consume content on the internet. I read blog posts that people share on Facebook that outline political beliefs that are quite different from my own, and quote supposed facts and statistics that support their argument. I have a hard time presuming any credibility on the author’s part when the post is full of grammatical mistakes and spelling errors. I imagine a crazy person clacking away at his keyboard in the dark of night surrounded by empty Mountain Dew cans, mumbling all the while, “Wait until everybody reads this!”
The thing is, the content may be provocative, interesting and maybe even correct; but I’ll never know it, because I immediately form a negative opinion about the writer’s education and intelligence. How could this person know very much about a complicated topic like this if he can’t even put a sentence together? How could this writer have a passion for the subject if she can’t even be bothered to proofread her article before she posted it?
This is completely unfair of me, of course. I do try to look past typos and mistakes in order to get at the information and opinions being presented, but it’s like trying to ignore a hangnail.
These bloggers (whom I imagine are crazy) are not alone. About once a week, I find a typo in an article published by an online news source that I respect. How did this make it through the copy-editing department? If they aren’t committed to quality in the text, how could they be committed to quality in reporting? At one point, I thought I would start keeping a list of links to all of the articles I found with typos, but I realized that that’s not the kind of collection you show to people at parties.
Typos may not kill in the way the above image suggests, but they do kill credibility, reputation and reader engagement.
You’re Probably Not the Right Proofreader for the Job
I get it. You may have a perfect understanding of the language, but your fingers don’t keep up with your brain as you type. When you’re in a hurry to publish, things slip through the cracks. If you do proof your work before you publish, you’re still at a disadvantage. According to Nick Stockton in an interesting piece he wrote for Wired, reading is a high-level task and the brain generalizes component parts of the task like grammar in order to concentrate on the much larger task of comprehending a complex idea. We combine sensory data with what we expect in order to extract meaning, and
When we’re reading other peoples’ work, this helps us arrive at meaning faster by using less brain power. When we’re proof reading our own work, we know the meaning we want to convey. Because we expect that meaning to be there, it’s easier for us to miss when parts (or all) of it are absent. The reason we don’t see our own typos is because what we see on the screen is competing with the version that exists in our heads.
Simply put, when it comes to proofreading your content, you’re the worst person for the job.
The Importance of Proofreading
No matter what kind of website you have, proofreading the content on your landing pages, your blog posts, your ads and everything else is a must. To maintain your brand image and credibility, these kinds of details can’t be overlooked. Get a second (or third) set of eyes to look over your content before you publish. If you can, hire a professional proofreader. Having someone else read your content can dramatically reduce embarrassing errors, and also ensure that the message is clear and digestible. The more people you anticipate seeing your content, the more important catching these errors becomes. You don’t want typos to kill a potential sale or client relationship.
