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Effective writing: Here's to a test that a good proofreader is sure to love
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What could be worse than spending weeks preparing a proposal, sending it and then noticing a typo in the first sentence? One little lapse can undermine your credibility. At the very least, it can prevent your reader from attending to your message.
For many writers, proofreading is challenging. We often have trouble spotting our own errors, and either we don't take the time to look for them or we don't have a systematic approach to finding them.
Here's a proofreading exercise in the form of a word-find puzzle. The paragraphs below contain 33 incorrect or misspelled words and one incorrect punctuation mark (a hyphen used in place of a dash). First, circle the errors, then replace them with the correct words and you'll see part of the toast I gave at my daughter's recent wedding.
Are you ready to play? Proofreader, meet text; text, meet proofreader. Here we go.
Wee all know that proofreading is important, and we whisk we could create perfect text. How many times have we told ourselves, "If yew would just slow down, you wouldn't let so many errors slip by"? One doesn't need to have a roamance with language to realize that patience, knot speed, is needed to produce text width few or no errors.
Thee ideea off effective proofreading is similar to carriage: As with a husband and wife, text becomes so familiar that the writer fails to see it with fresh eyes, butt as with any romants -- width people or with words -- one must find ways to see won amother as though for the first time, so that roamants width clean text becomes a way of lite.
One good proofreading technique is to set aside freshly written text, then come back to it hand try to read it as though someone else wrote it. Another helpful technique is to read your text one word at a time, as though you are having a private rommance width each word.
Certain errors can be detected only by thee person who created the text. But other errors, the tings hat slip below the conscious mind, can never be detected by the author. For this reason, a good approach is to ask someone else to proofread and catch those truely hard-to-find errors, which are the ones that madder most - so ask your fiends, your familly, an even thee peeple yoo glove to give you a hand.
How did you do? Did you find all 33 word errors plus the hyphen (-) used in place of its longer cousin, the dash (--)? If not, keep working. If you think you have figured out the toast, read on.
Here it is: "We wish you romance, not with the idea of marriage but romance with one another, romance with life and romance with the things that truly matter -- friends, family and the people you love."
That was our wish for our daughter and her new husband, and my wife and I think they will have it.
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