The Importance Of Proofing

February 20, 2011

First of all, I know it’s not Wednesday, but I’m writing this extra post for various reasons.

A few weeks ago, I explained that I’ve started to change the way that I’m working a little, most notably by getting the blog posts that are required for the coming week — or weeks — written and scheduled in advance, rather than leaving them to just before the deadline.

Overall, this has been going pretty well for me. I no longer have deadlines every day during the week, as I now get the posts scheduled at least a few days in advance and there’s no chance that a post won’t get published on a certain day because of some affecting factor at my end, such as a lack of internet.

What I have realised, however, is that because I’m writing all of the blog posts in one go, my ‘bad relationship’ with proofing is unfortunately becoming more prominent.

As readers of my posts will know, proofing is arguably my least favourite part of writing and I’ve tried various different ways to make it more tolerable.

Whilst I plan on hiring someone to proof my work for me in the future, I still want to do it myself at present and I’d kind of gotten myself into a routine that worked — write the piece, read through it properly once and then before it’s published, have a quick scan through to make sure there are no mistakes.

The problem I’ve had lately is that as I’m changing the way I work, I haven’t been able to go through that last ‘quick scan’ every time.

And because of that, there has been two occasions recently where a typo has got through on a piece that has been published — unfortunately, both here at Get Paid To Write Online.

If you didn’t notice them, that’s probably because of the quick editing skills of Sharon, but if you did notice them, either take this opportunity to give me a bit of a flogging or do something more productive — but arguably less fun — and learn from it.

Just because proofing isn’t my favourite aspect of writing, it doesn’t mean that I should neglect it and if anything, I should spend more time on it.

It can be difficult to get motivated doing something that you really don’t enjoy, however and this has given me the kick up the rear that I think I needed to either hire someone to proof my work before it goes live or rather than trying to write a certain amount of posts in a certain time frame, dedicate a set amount of time to writing AND proofing each piece, something that I don’t currently do.

I know we aren’t perfect and a typo here and there is understandable, but it’s little errors like this — when they’re frequent — that get to me as a writer and so I apologise.

And hey, if you spot a typo or mistake in this post, feel free to to take me up on that public flogging offer.