When writing, it is just as important to have good grammatical skills as it is to have creativity. The reason is that without a solid understand and application of spelling/punctuation/etc., judgement and understanding of the readers will likely be impaired. It is frustrating as a reader to come across an article with error after error; it looks sloppy and unprofessional, and is often difficult to comprehend.
Clearly, editors are the main proof-readers before a piece is published; nonetheless, there is no reason why the writers themselves cannot take the time to once-over their work to save everyone time and trouble. After all, at the end of the day it is the original composer that knows the exact points they were trying to get across; when things are left open-ended, vague, and unorganized, it's hard to decipher the writer's original intent in the first place.
The worst and most common errors, though, seem to be the little nit picky things that are too often overlooked. Redundancy, misspelled words, and improper use of punctuation are all common errors that should have been caught from the get go. These errors don't necessarily impair judgement of the readers, yet they make the original compositions look unreliable, as though no one cared enough to correct these mistakes at all.
People Search Pro is a link to a blog post by Julian Sher. He failed to perfectly edit his post prior to publishing. "Now imagine you tried to the same searches 20 years ago before he web existed" (paragraph 5). The word "do" is missing, which makes the sentence sound somewhat awkward. It should have been a fairly easy error to spot. There are several other errors I have come across in professional writing in newspapers and magazines, such as redundancy (ex. the reason is because that...), misspelling of words (ex. eachother), and poor punctuation (ex. going to his' home). These are all fairly minor errors, although that gives all the more reason they should have been spotted and corrected. In my opinion, minor errors that happen once in a blue moon are acceptable; consistant erors and failure too proofreid are inacceptible in todays' dayand age.
Note: Image from: http://blog.thestar.com.my/photos/2006/3/2/unrealweapon1607_1.jpg
Clearly, editors are the main proof-readers before a piece is published; nonetheless, there is no reason why the writers themselves cannot take the time to once-over their work to save everyone time and trouble. After all, at the end of the day it is the original composer that knows the exact points they were trying to get across; when things are left open-ended, vague, and unorganized, it's hard to decipher the writer's original intent in the first place.
The worst and most common errors, though, seem to be the little nit picky things that are too often overlooked. Redundancy, misspelled words, and improper use of punctuation are all common errors that should have been caught from the get go. These errors don't necessarily impair judgement of the readers, yet they make the original compositions look unreliable, as though no one cared enough to correct these mistakes at all.
People Search Pro is a link to a blog post by Julian Sher. He failed to perfectly edit his post prior to publishing. "Now imagine you tried to the same searches 20 years ago before he web existed" (paragraph 5). The word "do" is missing, which makes the sentence sound somewhat awkward. It should have been a fairly easy error to spot. There are several other errors I have come across in professional writing in newspapers and magazines, such as redundancy (ex. the reason is because that...), misspelling of words (ex. eachother), and poor punctuation (ex. going to his' home). These are all fairly minor errors, although that gives all the more reason they should have been spotted and corrected. In my opinion, minor errors that happen once in a blue moon are acceptable; consistant erors and failure too proofreid are inacceptible in todays' dayand age.
Note: Image from: http://blog.thestar.com.my/photos/2006/3/2/unrealweapon1607_1.jpg
Good point! Writers do need to look over their work and try to catch the small errors before they are published.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how well the intentional errors at the end really work for you though. To me it made the whole thing lose credibility because it looks like you got lazy and didn't follow your own advice.