R … e … v … i … e … w

By Mark Pepper

“What’s that empty little slot for, nurse?”

“That’s for the scalpel you used to cut his stomach open.”

“Oops. And now I’ve just sown him up. Never mind, it’ll work its way out.”

No. It won’t.

Writing isn’t saving lives, but we are equally beholden to produce top quality results to the best of our ability. For a freelance writer, a failure to make final checks can be seriously detrimental to the success of their business. This is the QA (Quality Assurance) part of your job description and you CANNOT skip it if you want to be part of the cream on top of that huge vat of so-so milk.

Spelcheque

This, as the saying goes, is not rocket science. If you’re writing in Word you will notice that red squiggly lines appear under certain words. This indicates a spelling mistake, or at least a word that Mr. Word doesn’t have in his dictionary. Or you may get a green squiggle which indicates the spelling is okay but it isn’t right in that context. Then again, you may have a whole sentence underlined, and a right-click over this will reveal: “Fragment – consider revising.” This means your sentence is questionably phrased, according to Mr. Word’s programming. (I always ignore this – he’s not taking my artistic licence into account, luv.)

If you don’t have an automatic spell-check, then you need to manually activate one after you’ve finished writing and make certain nothing pops up.

I’m sure some of you will think I’m teaching my grandmother to suck eggs here, but the evidence would suggest that many writers simply don’t run this basic check.

Neither, it seems, do they bother to actually reread what they’ve written. This is a quite astounding oversight and I am always thoroughly stunned when I see it happen. I’ve seen websites belonging to some of the largest companies in the world with obvious spelling mistakes and sundry errors on them. Sometimes you think you must have landed on some bogus doppelgänger site.

I repeat: it is simply not enough to run a spell-check as your final activity. Your words may all be in the computer’s dictionary, but you may not have them in the right order or the right context. For example, had I written “write” just then instead of “right”, it would not have been flagged up.

One of the most common errors occurs when you have rewritten a sentence but have not completely removed all remnants of the old version. Thus you end up with something like: “This is a great products that you will want need to buy.” That would have started off as “These are great products that you will want to buy”. Then the writer decides to make it singular but fails to remove the “s” from products, and also thinks it should be “need” rather than “want” but ends up keeping both in by mistake.

This is laziness, pure and simple.

Yeah, well it looks fine to me, buddy

There is also a real skill to editing your own work because it’s easy to develop word-blindness. This is where you can’t see your mistakes because you know what you intended to say. Thus, that’s what you see when you read through – what you intended to write, not what’s actually there. This is why I put all the ellipses in the word “Review” in the title; to suggest a slow process.

You should check your work out loud one deliberate word at a time, as though you have just learned to read. Don’t assume anything. Mistakes that head off to a client can always be corrected, but can never be recalled. If your client spots them you will look unprofessional. If your client misses them, publishes them to their website and someone else subsequently spots them, you will likely lose that client.

If you’ve ever read a novel and seen a spelling mistake in the prose, you’ve seen just how easy it is to screw up even under the most vigorous scrutiny. Check out the following process and then ask yourself how the hell any mistakes could remain.

The novelist writes the novel, then probably rewrites it several times, and rereads it countless times. Friends and family also often take a peek. It’s then read by an agent who sends it back for revisions, then reads it again. It goes to a publishing editor who reads it and suggests revisions. The novelist rewrites and the editor rereads. This can happen more than once. It then goes to a professional copy editor who scans for mistakes, then sends it back to you for approval. You reread and approve. It then goes to the typesetter who gets it ready for printing, and has to read it to do so. You receive a proof copy for approval, and it goes to a professional proof reader to make sure the typesetter got it right. The proof reader makes corrections and you make sure you agree. Then it’s printed.

How many people have been involved there? How many times has the work been read through? And yet mistakes still manage to survive the process.

You shouldn’t get paranoid about it. There is a time when you have to fire it off and you don’t need to read something fifteen times before that happens. However, my opinion is that you should give your work three reads minimum.

Ultimately, it all depends on how much you care about the quality of your work.