Feature article: A cautionary tale Why everyone needs a proofreader...including proofreaders!

Humor: I'll bet they wish they hadn't named their web site that Let's laugh at our mistakes!

Tip of the month

From the CNN web site’s archives:

CNN's Richard Blystone at Camp Zeist

January 31, 2001
Web posted at: 4:08 PM EST (2108 GMT)

Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah also stared straight ahead as he was found not guilty. Dressed in Libyan robes with a dark cap, he turned to Al-Megrahi and appeared to say a few words before he was lead away.

Please tell me you see what’s wrong in the above article excerpt. Can’t find it? Okay, I  choke under pressure sometimes too, so I’ll just tell you. The final sentence ends “…before he was lead away.” It should be led.

This mistake has been popping up in print and on the ’Net with alarming frequency. You know we're all in trouble when a reputable news organization makes this error.

Lead is a chemical element in the periodic table that has the symbol Pb (Latin: plumbum) and atomic number 82. A soft, heavy, toxic and malleable poor metal, lead is bluish white when freshly cut but tarnishes to dull gray when exposed to air.  (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

Now, I know what's hanging you up here. The past tense of READ (pronounced reed) is READ (pronounced red). And then there's Led Zeppelin. As you're no doubt aware, the band took its name from a comment by the Who's Keith Moon who said that Jimmy Page's new band would go over "like a lead balloon." Page and his bandmates then spelled the heavy metal LEAD as LED to avoid any confusion in pronunciation. What they did in the process was confuse the whole English-speaking world.

There's no easy way to remember this, so you're just going to have to commit it to memory. The past tense of lead  is led. Not lead. Got it?  

Now go and sin thusly no more.

A cautionary tale

A new client came the publicist's way, one that promised to be lucrative. In her excitement, the publicist dashed off an incisive, newsworthy press release and threw it in the mail post-haste.

Before the publicist had a chance to follow up with the media, the client called and left a message on her voice mail. He'd received his copy of the news release in the mail. He would no longer require her services , he said.

Because she'd misspelled his business's name throughout the news release.

Oh, the shame! The horror! The lost income!

I could regale you with similar tales of woe—and they are endless—but you're probably thinking, “So what? I’m not a publicist. My writing doesn’t have to be perfect. My area of expertise lies elsewhere.”

Which is precisely why you need a proofreader. Oh, how you need a proofreader. Even proofreaders, when writing, need a proofreader. Because the brain switches to autopilot when reading something of its own creation. Instead of seeing what's actually there, it sees what should be there.

Even if you do give your written material the once-over before sending it out, you may have fallen victim to the biggest mass delusion of our technology age: that the Internet and its chatspeak shorthand has revolutionized language to the extent that proper spelling, grammar and punctuation are obsolete. Even—gasp!—quaint.

Here I need you to picture me as Dom Deluise in Blazing Saddles as he’s heckling the dancers with a megaphone to his mouth: WRONG! Why? Readers of sloppy, unedited writing think: “He didn’t care enough to do it right.” Or “How good at her job can she be if she can't spell 'their' correctly?”

Some years ago, an attorney sent me an email solicitation with a headline that blared:  SOMEDAY YOUR GOING TO NEED A LAWYER!!!

Now, this guy must be clairvoyant, because I recently did have to retain a lawyer. But I would sooner eat haggis than hire one who doesn’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re.” Are you catching my drift here?

If you regularly send out communication pieces riddled with typos, inconsistencies and bloated verbiage, at best you’ll get a polite “We’ve decided to go in a different direction.” At worst, the recipient will save your piece to bring out and share when office morale dips.

And if your written materials aren’t polished to a high sheen, every skill set you have comes into question. In the same way that the eyes are the window to the soul, your writing is the window to your competence and credibility.

You’re no doubt brilliant at what you do. Why not let your writing communicate that fact?