Yes, it’s that important - to your readers, to the sources you’re naming and for your credibility.Ī checklist can be helpful anytime during your writing process, but at the very least, glance at it before you hit “publish.” It will help you make some great saves. That may seem extreme, but I like the idea of thinking of names that way: If I spell one wrong, my story fails.
I heard a story once about a professor who would give an assignment an F if a student misspelled even one name. “Personal names” are on that list because misspelled names are one of our top mistakes at NPR (you can see all of the things we’ve had to correct at NPR Corrections). Everyone needs a reminder once in a while. Keep an accuracy checklist, like this one from NPR, in a visible spot. It’s a list, from NPR Standards and Practices Editor Mark Memmott, of 13 things that “must be double- or triple-checked” because journalists often get them wrong. I keep the NPR Accuracy Checklist taped to my computer monitor. Click on each one and see what the program suggests you could do differently. Consider doing one read-through where you’re focusing only on the underscored words and phrases. It’s easy, however, to get used to those little red and green squiggles and just read over them. If you don’t work in a program that enables them, consider changing your workflow. Use technology! Spellcheck and grammar-check tools are a good first line of defense. Spellcheck and grammar check are your friends When you come back to your story, change things up using some of the suggestions above. Go for a walk, watch a short video, make a phone call or read something on a totally unrelated topic. NPR’s chief copy editor, Susan Vavrick, likes to read the story from bottom to top, instead of top to bottom. Merrill Perlman, Columbia Journalism Review’s Language Corner blogger, has said, “Every time you read it the same way, you read less of it and recite more of it from memory. Read it aloud - to yourself or to someone else - or have someone else read it to you. Make the text or background a different color. Print it out if you’ve been working on a screen. If you’re feeling too familiar with your story, change how you’re reading it. If you caught a misspelled last name, for example, check the first name, title and even the company name while you’re at it. So if you find one, look nearby for others. We tend to repeat words like “a,” “the,” “and” and “but” as we type.Īs ACES also notes, errors often travel in pairs. You’re also likely to catch duplicate words during this type of rereading. The American Copy Editors’ Society says that is one of the most common causes of typos. If you do go back and make a change, be extra careful not to insert a new error. Make a mark if something bothers you and go back to it when you’re done. Don’t stop to look something up or change anything. Read your story one last time, all the way through - just like a reader would. Here are six easy ways to get started: 1. Taking a few extra minutes to clean up your story is critical to maintaining your credibility with readers. Yet in many newsrooms, the layers of editing that stories used to go through are disappearing. It’s something journalists have known for many years. A Wayne State/ACES study that measured people’s impressions of edited news stories versus those that went unedited found that readers perceived the edited articles as having higher quality and more value. These types of mistakes - grammar, spelling, missing/incorrect context, style - make readers doubt the professionalism of your work. How’d it go? (For more practice, try this copy editing quiz, or these.) See how many issues you can spot, then click “publish” to see the edited version.īefore he was Ivan Drago, Hee-Man or an “Expendable”, Dolf Lundgren was just another six-foot-five Norwegian male model with a black-belt in Karate and a degreee in chemical engineering. Here’s a paragraph from a story that I’ve littered with all sorts of common errors. In this post, we’ll go over six tips for self-editing that will save you from typos, inaccuracies and other mistakes.īut first, an exercise. No one is available to read behind you and it’s nearly time to hit “publish.”Ĭall on the copy editor within. But at this point, you’ve read it so many times, you fear you’ve missed something.
Typo mistakes free#
You hope your story’s free of typos and grammatical mistakes. You, reporter/blogger, have been working on a story all day, and it’s deadline time.
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