Proofreading is Ded

It’s to the point where I can’t pick up Time magazine at all. It’s not that I’m not fond of getting my news fix. It’s that I’m not fond of typos and grammar slips.

I’d love to believe it’s just a recent problem, but when I subscribed a number of years ago, I let the subscription lapse for the same reason. If I can’t read past page four without encountering mistakes, how can I believe what I’m reading? And that for me is the crux of it. The moment I see mistakes in the copy, the copy somehow doesn’t seem so trustworthy.

Oh, I’m no stranger to my own boo-boos and blunders. I’ve been known to let a few slip into print, too (and not on purpose, like the one above). But we’re talking the difference between a Time Warner publication and little old me: the difference between Hollywood and Otumwa, Iowa; the difference between caviar and catfish.

I know publishing budgets have disappeared in the last decade. Thanks to the Internet (a venue where you can read just about anything for free), there are fewer subscribers, which means smaller budgets and smaller staff sizes. I was once an overworked editor myself. But one thing I did do–I made damn sure what we put out in print form was as technically perfect as possible. Sadly, my former trade journal had fewer mistakes in print in the four years I was on staff than Time has had in the past four months.

Which brings me to you. What exactly are you presenting to the world? Are you handing over your articles, books and worse, query letters to editors on the assumption that they will clean up your grammar and punctuation? What makes you believe that your overworked, underpaid editor has time to do your job? And in the end, it really is your job to deliver the best possible copy you can. Perhaps you should look at it this way; the more you trust someone else to catch your mistakes, the more you run the risk of having those mistakes hit print. I can’t think of a worse impression to leave on potential clients.