The awkward paragraph below appears in a Kindle e-book of my
\nshort stories I just published:<\/p>\n
“No problem,” Van Helsing said, looking them up and down
\nappraisingly. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of goulash for
\neverybody.” He looked at them appraisingly. “Though I may need
\nto use a bigger pot.”<\/p>\n
The flaw, of course, is the repetition of “appraisingly.”<\/p>\n
What makes this error particularly awful is that I read the
\nstory half a dozen times before publishing it.<\/p>\n
Yet it wasn’t until I sat down to read a copy of the published
\nbook that I finally noticed the error.<\/p>\n
Worse, my fiction writing teacher read and edited the story
\nbefore the book was published.<\/p>\n
So did the professional proofreader I hired to review the book
\nin galley. And they both missed it, as did I.<\/p>\n
My point is: whether you are a fiction writer, nonfiction
\nwriter, copywriter, or any other kind of writer, it’s a
\nchallenge to prevent these kinds of sloppy and obvious errors
\nfrom slipping in.<\/p>\n
Therefore, it’s my belief that you should NEVER submit a draft
\nto your publisher, printer, or client without having your copy
\nchecked over several times … by you as well as by at least one
\nother person.<\/p>\n
In my freelance copywriting business, when I come up with a
\nconcept for a new promotion – usually consisting of a few
\nheadlines and a lead of a few hundred words – I always run it by
\nIB.<\/p>\n
IB is on a monthly retainer to me for the express purposes of
\nbeing available to review and render an immediate opinion on
\nalmost everything I write – not only copy for my clients but
\nblog posts, essays, articles, and e-mails and landing pages for
\nmy information marketing business.<\/p>\n
I often show my concepts to one or two other trusted associates
\nin addition to IB to be sure that my ideas are on the right
\ntrack – in other words, that they are compelling, fresh, and
\nengaging.<\/p>\n
When I have written the copy, I then show it to JK, my
\nproofreader, who goes through it to catch any typos I may have
\nmade.<\/p>\n
The benefits of this in-house review process are twofold.<\/p>\n
First, it enables me to be confident that I am showing only good
\nwork to clients, publishers, and subscribers.<\/p>\n
Second, it allows me to submit very clean copy, which in turn
\ngives clients and publishers confidence in the work I give them.<\/p>\n
Typos and other errors – such as in my example of repeating
\n“appraisingly” twice in one paragraph – jar readers. Spotting
\neven a minor error can go a long way in ruining their opinion of
\nthe rest of the piece. Unfortunate, but that’s the way it is.<\/p>\n
Very early in my career, my client ZC, to my great surprise,
\ntold me he thought my copy for his software brochure was weak.<\/p>\n
I read it again and didn’t see any problem, so I asked him what
\nwas wrong.<\/p>\n
“You wrote it too quickly and didn’t take any care with the
\nwork,” he said in an annoyed tone.<\/p>\n
I asked ZC how he reached this conclusion.<\/p>\n
His answer: “You must have rushed it because on page 3, you
\nmisspelled ‘algorithm.'”<\/p>\n
I don’t ever again want to have the client or reader become
\nunfairly prejudiced against a great piece of copy for the sole
\nreason that it contains a sloppy typo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The awkward paragraph below appears in a Kindle e-book of my short stories I just published: “No problem,” Van Helsing said, looking them up and down appraisingly. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of goulash for everybody.” He looked at them appraisingly. “Though I may need to use a bigger pot.” The flaw, of course, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":948,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions\/948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}