Our friends across the pond seem to have special days for almost everything. In March alone, the Americans have the likes of Tartar Sauce Day, National Dress in Blue Day, National Peanut Butter Lover’s Day (surely that should be every day?) and even National Funeral Director and Mortician Recognition Day. Most of these suspiciously commercial-minded celebrations pass us by at Rosy Towers, but one of them has definitely caught our eye.
On March the 8th, it was…… drum roll, please…. National Proofreading Day. Yes, really. This is designed to highlight the importance, or perhaps impotence, of proofreading. A seemingly pointless celebration, maybe, but it does remind us here that proofreading is a hugely important aspect of content creation. Without it, content that’s written with creativity and designed to grab the attention will lose its impact.
Now, at this stage I could just create a few sentences packed with a handful of deliberate mistakes just for comedic effect, but I wouldn’t cheapen myself or my industry by doing so. I have far too much diggity for that. On a serious note, though, too many people associate proofreading with spell-checking, but there’s more to it than that, just ask the grammar police.
Consider this sentence:
The ingredients of a goat’s cheese salad are tomatoes, lettuce, red onion, vinegar, goats, cheese.
There are two distinct errors here. Clearly, you’re not going to include goats in the recipe, the comma needs to disappear and an apostrophe needs to be brought in. The ingredient is obviously goat’s cheese.
The second error is a little more abstract. The mistake is writing the recipe in the first place, because goat’s cheese salad tastes revolting.
So, back to the importance of proofreading, and how it fits into the digital age. Spelling and grammatical errors in previous years were mainly restricted to the printed media. A mistake was generally read once, sometimes noticed and sometimes not, then everyone moved on. On the internet, however, a glaring error is there for all to see, in perpetuity and, in some cases, standing out like a luminous high-vis jacket in the front window of a lighting store.
And if that mistake happens to be on your company’s website, what do you think it says about your goods and services? Many people think the odd error is fine, but a series of them tells the world that you haven’t done your homework, or worse, that you’ve done your homework but didn’t bother to make corrections. One thing is highly likely; a number of potential customers, and some existing ones, will be questioning your credibility. Can you afford to take such a gamble?
Here at Rose Media Group, we know our content has to be as good as our reputation. As a leading Sussex-based B2B PR specialist, we will always strive to make sure our blog posts, press releases, case studies, whitepapers, articles and web content are forever 100% error-free. Our founder, Aneela Rose, really wouldn’t have it any other way. Accuracy and attention to detail add to our credibility, and that gives our clients the confidence they need to thrive.
Our focus simply has to be on perfection, time after time after time.
