Proof Positive: How to Edit Your Own Copy
You’ve just hammered out a difficult news release, beat your deadline by an hour and left yourself one last opportunity to polish your work before you submit it. But you don’t want to proof this yourself after being so close to it, and you don’t have another available proofreader. What can you do?
It takes a village to raise a child, and bringing in a cold eye to proof your work is without a doubt the best way to ensure accuracy, clarity and quality in your writing. But when this isn’t possible, there is still a way you can proof your own material effectively. Here are eight guidelines to use, including common PR spelling, grammar, style and math pitfalls to be on the lookout for.
Rest between writing and proofing - Once you’ve finished a piece, take a break from it for as long as possible to give your mind time to forget about it and fill itself with other thoughts. This distance will allow you to come back to proof your piece more objectively.
Change environments - Before you begin proofing, try to find a space away from your normal workspace –an empty conference room, perhaps – that that will allow you to get away from the usual e-mail, phone and people distractions. Not only will this allow you the quietness to concentrate more easily, it will take you out of the comfort zone of your familiar computer, desk, chair – and even coffee cup – to give you that extra sharpness to scrutinize copy.
Proof on hard copy - This could be the single most important guideline for proofing. Always review your work on hard copy. Proofing on hard copy allows you to read a printed text more naturally (looking down to read instead of looking horizontally). It also lets you take printed text with you to an optimal location for reading and helps you review with a keener eye because you’re breaking away from the comfort zone of your computer screen.
Read out loud - Similar to reviewing on hard copy, this can prove an invaluable aid that enables you to see your work from a different perspective and judge it more minutely. You take advantage of a different one of your five senses to pick up on errors, discrepancies and questionable passages.
Proof at least three times - Begin proofing with a preliminary skim of the document to ensure that major typographical features – such as font size, line spacing, text alignment and bullet indentation – are correct and consistent. Next, make one complete editorial read-through (pass), reading v-e-r-y slowly to scrutinize and ponder everything from spelling and punctuation to grammar and diction. Then make a final pass, trying to read it exactly at the same speed and level of scrutiny as your intended audience, and looking for errors you may have missed and fixing any errors you inadvertently introduced on you’re an earlier pass.
Be on guard against common misspellings - Note below the correct spellings of these words that can be commonly misspelled in PR writing.
accommodate
acknowledgment
canceled
catalog
dialogue
embarrass
judgment
newsstand
occasion
parallel
possess
similar
sizable
supersede
theater
weird
Watch out for these common PR grammar and style pitfalls -
The Inc. comma - The corporate identifier Inc. is no longer set off with commas after a company name: PepsiCo Inc. reported a 14% increase in second-quarter profit. But one of the most common errors in writing is to place a comma before Inc. and then not place one after it. If for some reason you use a comma in front of Inc. in mid-sentence, you must use one after the abbreviation to set it off properly as a non-restrictive part of the sentence.
The identifier comma - A similar pitfall relates to the placement of a comma before a state or country name but not after the name when the name follows a city in mid-sentence. Again, the comma must be used both before and after the name in this use: Smith visited Procter & Gamble’s headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, last week.
In parallel - If you’re using bulleted lists, the most common error is a lack of parallel construction. If the first bulleted item is a noun, the rest of the items should be nouns. If the first item is a complete sentence, the rest of the items should be as well. Each item must be a continuation of the introductory sentence.
Incorrect
The solution provides these benefits:
Lower cost.
Allows a single point of access.
Digitization of paper processes.
Integrates legacy systems.
Correct
The solution provides these benefits:
Lower cost.
Single point of access.
Digitization of paper processes.
Integration of legacy systems.
Double-check your math - Just as spelling and grammar errors can slip easily into copy, so can numerical mistakes. Check for them and watch out for these problems:
A point on percentages - If the unemployment rate was 4% last year and 3% this year, how much did it fall? It’s easy to become distracted by the presence of percentages and say 1%. Wrong. It changed one percentage point but dropped 25% because one out of four is one-fourth, or 25%. The same principle applies if company XYZ’s market share was 25% last year and is 50% this year. In this case, the company’s market share rose 100% (the change, 25, is 100% of the old number, 25) or changed 25 percentage points.
Below zero - What’s wrong with this? Shares of the stock fell 500% in the past year. Percent means per hundred. Therefore, something cannot decrease by more than 100%, because once it has decreased by 100% – it’s gone! Yes, in a case where the old number was 500 and the new number is 100, the old number was five times as big. But that doesn’t mean the decrease is 500%.