The Importance of Proofreading Your Work Before Posting Online

We live in a world where a person’s attention span when browsing the Internet is about the same as a goldfish. You can have the most interesting things to say, and yet people can breeze right past. This is because we live in an attention economy. Everyone’s marketing efforts are first and foremost to grab your attention. You cannot inform the populace about anything from an idea to a product without first grabbing their attention. Plus, with Google ranking grammatically correct articles over those riddled with spelling mistakes, it’s about time people took more care of their articles before posting online.This is why proofreading your work is so imperative.

While it may seem unfair, you have a very short period of time to hook a reader in. In that time, the reader can be turned off by any number of things. Your tone of voice, your topic, and, most importantly, your grammar. People love to criticizethe slightest infraction. This tendency has given rise to the “grammar Nazi”. You will most often find these “Nazis” in comment boards where the easiest way to insult someone’s intelligence is to point out faults with their means of communication – most commonly, “your” instead of “you’re.”

Whether it’s in part due to the rise of people correcting each other constantly online, or perhaps instead due to the attention economy, people will not read through obvious errors. Their patience has ended before it has even begun. To hook a reader, you must first make sure that the process of reading is as smooth and fluid as it can be.

Poor writing doesn’t just mean grammar and spelling mistakes, either. You can have drawn-out sentences. You can have awkward phrasing. You can rely far too heavily on cliché’s, or you can try something too stylized. There are so many things you can do wrong and here’s the thing – you won’t be able to catch them all.

That’s why you need to hire a proofreader. In the end, it doesn’t matter how proficient you are at grammar. You won’t be able to catch everything, especially if you’re the writer. This is because when you read your words back to yourself, you will hear them in your voice. This is the same voice that you heard when you wrote them in the first place. Your inner voice, in this case, will lie to you, and you won’t be able to hear the awkward phrasing that will be so clear to someone else, so let that someone else take the lead.

Proofreading is important for everyone, from blog writers to marketers and everyone in-between. As soon as you write anything down, you should proofread it. Even small things such as proofreading your emailscan mean the difference between being written off or taken seriously. In marketing, proofreading is essential – you are trying to inform people of a product, and the last thing you want is the response to be them pointing out an obvious mistake.

Making mistakes is part of human nature. All you need to do is go back and fix them. The best solution is to have someone else go through it, as they will be able to spot the mistakes that you glossed over easily.