Kirsty Mathewson has been a Contentoo freelancer for over two years and a professional copywriter for more than a decade. However, like all writers, she still lets a typo or grammatical error slip through the net, occasionally.
Here are some tips from Kirsty about how to avoid typos and mistakes.
- Take ownership of your work. No matter how tight the deadline or how long the article is, you must always leave plenty of time to proof and review your work. Your clients are very likely to check over your work but the buck stops with you when it comes to delivering the highest standards of copy.
- Make the most of the tools available to you. I love Grammarly, which has a good free version. Grammarly not only corrects your spelling and punctuation mistakes, but it also highlights sentences where you could be more concise and offers general feedback on content flow, clarity and style. Of course, there are built-in spelling and grammar apps on Google Docs and MS Office too.
- Don’t rely entirely on spell check. Grammarly doesn’t always flag every mistake and usage errors such as ‘their’ and ‘there’ aren’t picked up every time.
- Read your copy out loud. This is an exercise that is best carried out alone or with a sympathetic audience! Hearing your carefully-crafted copy out loud can highlight too-long sentences or paragraphs that lack direction, could be more concise or don’t form part of a cohesive whole.
- Call in a favour. It’s not always possible to ask someone to proof your work, especially at short notice. But, if you have a willing friend or colleague with a good eye for detail and a firm understanding of grammar and spelling, an extra pair of eyes is invaluable.
- Come back to it later. I often wait until the following day to review my copy with fresh eyes. This approach has spared me many blushes…