Whether you are building web sites, posting to your site, advertising or writing articles, then it is definitely crucial that you carefully proof read your work. And it could be well worth getting someone else to give it the final once in excess of. And recently this was displayed beautifully to me whilst booking a holiday rental for a week. It sounds a harmless activity and we found an ideal apartment to rent. But, the description did include the sentence:

“Located opposite the famous playing fields of St Paul’s School in a quiet but attractive central but predominantly residential, area of South-West London, you will have straightforward access to the centre if that is your gaol, but be able to escape.”

Did you spot the mistake?
Now read that again if you did not spot the mistake! It is very straightforward to miss (especially for those who are used to American spellings), but the last few words absolutely talk around “gaol” (rather than “goal”) and making an escape.

Maybe the apartment’s owner has a sense of humour (I’ll find out – we did book the ‘gaol’), but more budding she has typed up the sentence, checked for spelling mistakes and quickly read in excess of it again to be sure that that it does make sense.

The importance of proof reading, carefully and slowly!
This is only one of the lots of words in the English language that if you make a straightforward mistake on a couple of letters the meaning changes completely. And in this circumstance, talking around a holiday letting as a gaol does not really do it any favours!

And that is the problem with proof reading your own work. If you read your own work you are liable to assume that the correct word is written down at that point in the sentence only because it has not been highlighted as a spelling error. You need to take your time and if the correct wording is crucial have someone else read more than it for you and highlight your errors.

It is not merely errors like this one they may pick up on. There are also punctuation rules and grammar problems where you may think you have used the correct term, but have not. Such as, “to loads of people” and “too lots of people” are both valid, but in totally different contexts. You may know which one to use, but that can lull you into a false sense of security when you proof read it and you could miss the problem.

If a piece of writing is important then don’t merely give it a cursory glance for highlighted spelling errors. Get someone else to give it the once in excess of to be sure that any hidden mistakes are picked up and the finished work will look masses better.

Written by Keith Lunt, who offers a website design Liverpool service. For more useful tips about good web design call into the blog.

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