Proofreading Your Content: The Area to be Nit-Picky

Posted by Rose Strong

Have you ever read an article or book and found that one glaringly wrong typo and wonder how no one caught the glaring error? We’ve all read signs in store windows and thought the person who wrote it should go back to high school English class and review sentence structure. Many of these typos have made it into emails or on Facebook for some good belly laughs.

- Gun Shop
- Prince Harry

Fresh eyes are so important in writing professionally. Regardless of what your business is or who you’re writing for, if it isn’t well-written on your website, blog post or printed materials or even your Twitter feed and Facebook status, you could be losing potential business.

Mangle a sentence or misspell a few words, forget a comma or two and you immediately send the message that your business does haphazard work.

This past May, I started with Furia Rubel in the capacity of office administrator. With an office staff of five, this position is more than just keeping an appointment calendar, answering the phone and filing. It offers a variety of tasks, one of which is proofreading.

For the past nine years, I’ve been writing professionally as a part-time freelancer, mostly for a local weekly newspaper here in Bucks County. Let me say one thing, there is a world of difference between being the writer and being the proofreader.

As a writer, I do my research, put words on the screen, review a few times and send them off to an editor. Regarding proofreading, you’d think that it’s basically about checking for misspellings and making sure sentences make sense. Oh no! That’s only part of the job.

For the last five months, I’ve had a crash course in proofreading and I’m still learning. And the job of course, is about making sure things are spelled right, but don’t forget about extra spaces, over-used quotation marks and the Oxford comma.

And then of course there’s style. In Furia Rubel’s case, that’s the AP Stylebook for most things, but there are those odd questions we ask one another, “Is it health care or healthcare?” “Does nonprofit have a hyphen?” “Is board of directors capitalized?” “Should that have a comma or semi-colon?” “Shouldn’t that word be pluralized?” “Is third-world-country a politically correct term?” And the list goes on, every day. The AP Stylebook is our go-to source for these kinds of questions.

It sounds nit-picky, (yes, there is a hyphen in that) but it all comes down to doing great work, making sense and sharing a cohesive and well-thought-out message with our audience.

- Cost of Not Proofreading
- Grammar Girl

Grammar Issues in the Workplace

Posted by Amanda Walsh

I’ve noticed a lot of grammar posts and articles in the blogosphere lately. I’m not really sure why it’s become a point of focus, but we ladies here at Furia Rubel are certainly glad that more business-minded people are paying closer attention to the importance of proper grammar.

In the age of text messages, tweets and social media posts, it seems that everyone is trying to find the quickest way to communicate a message. Unfortunately, grammar has taken a back seat in our fast-paced world.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an interesting article with an interactive quiz to test your grammar skills. The article discusses ways hiring managers and business people are working to combat bad writing and grammar usage in the workplace. The author spoke to generational and human resources experts who noted that the grammar gaffes are being blamed on the 20- and 30-something employees at an organization. I tend to think that anyone can commit grammar mistakes regardless of their age.

One controversial grammar rule is “the Oxford comma.” It is the extra comma put before “and” or “or” in a series of nouns. Many argue that without it, the meaning of a sentence is completely altered. Those of us that adhere to AP Stylebook guidelines generally tend not to use it in the majority of our business writing. The author highlights another typical grammar mistake with this example: “He expected Helen and I to help him," instead of “Helen and me.” To test if you're using the rule correctly, you should be able to delete the other subject from the sentence and still have it make sense. To read more about this rule, go to The Guide to Grammar and Writing.

Perhaps the more we discuss grammar and encourage good writing and communicating skills, we can overcome the commonly-used grammar faux pas. To read more about some typical grammar gaffes, check out the article on WSJ.com.

Photo courtesy of SomeEcards.com.