Proofreading is Essential in Targeting the Right Business Audience

• All online content must be engaging so that business owners can attract the right kind of target market. For this, our guest post is all about proofreading and marketing properly to ensure that your message will cut through your audience.

• In writing, a lot of people are taught to focus on the ‘what’ more than the ‘how’. While the main content of a written text is the most important part, one must remember that the function of proper grammatical usage is so that the main content seamlessly travels from the author’s mind to the reader’s mind.

• When the paper or screen gets in the way of the meaning of the text, misunderstandings arise. Especially in a world filled with critical people, small grammatical mistakes can lead to all kinds of problems with interpretation, as well as the propagation of the text; people who are especially anal about grammar won’t spread an article plagued with grammatical errors, except for mockery or lamentation regarding grammar and its misuse.

• Professional editing and proofreading services are becoming increasingly common yet not to the point of ubiquity. Surprisingly, not a lot of people think of proofreading as an essential part of the writing process. This stems from a common misconception about proofreading: that the presence of technology removes the need for manual proofreading and that built-in software spelling and grammar checkers will catch all of the possible mistakes in the text. Here are two of the most common problems that come with that way of thinking, though:

• A lot of word processors only check the spelling of the word used and not its validity in the sentence. This could easily lead to words like ‘ore’ being passed off as a valid replacement for ‘or’.

• Language is fluid, and newer articles may contain new words or old words that have simply acquired new usages but will be seen by the word processor as a misused word and may even suggest replacements that’ll alter the original meaning of the text.

• To date, there are no automatic proofreading programs that can read context, tone, or rhythm in written text. This is especially noticeable in poetry, since proofreading programs typically don’t take into account the typographical nature of the text; if you try pasting a poem into a proofreading program, the enjambments alone will cause it to show all kinds of grammatical errors.

Here are some of the things proofreading programs cannot check for as well:

• Incorrect dates, names, or proper nouns –there’s no correct spelling for dates, names, and most proper nouns. Proofreading programs will just identify whatever they’re familiar with as correct and whatever they’re not familiar with as incorrect.

• Inadequate word usage – writing requires a bit of knowledge in rhythm and tone, such that words flow easily together when read. For example, the word ‘bad’ and ‘ominous’ are quite similar, but there are instances when they cannot be used interchangeable, or when the usage of one is more effective than the other.

• Redundancy – in speech, people have a tendency of repeating and reiterating their thoughts simply because you can’t easily go back to what the speaker says in a particularly long speech. In written text, however, repetition is unnecessary because the reader could easily glance back to previous paragraphs or pages. In many cases, repetition becomes annoying and will distract the reader from the message the writer is trying to convey.

• Inconsistency of writing style – there are plenty of accepted ways of writing, hence, the abundance of style books available. One of the most common quibbles about writing styles is whether or not one should use an oxford comma or not. There isn’t one writing style that fits all paradigms perfectly, however, what’s important is the consistency of the writing style; in one article, if you switch between using and not using an oxford comma, it’ll stick out and draw the reader’s attention.

• Confusing structure – another writing step people love to skip is creating an outline. While experts could usually get away without creating an outline, a lot of beginners end up writing whatever comes to mind, regardless of whether or not it makes sense. This leads to a text that doesn’t seem to have a central theme or topic.

• Ambiguous words – a lot of writers use words that are actually ‘empty’. Empty words are words that tell instead of show. For example, by saying that a person is tall, you don’t give a particularly useful image to the readers since not everyone has the same standard for being tall.

As you can see, there are plenty of problems that a proofreading program can’t easily detect and fix. These problems could easily distort the meaning of the article and possibly kill both the idea and the author’s reputation. Especially in advertising, mistakes in grammatical structure could easily destroy the credibility of a company and turn off potential clients. Conversely, however, proofreading ensures that your writing captures exactly what you have in mind.