Getting It Right And Looking Professional

How to blog without looking like a complete and utter dork!

Drawn by a chorus of crackling laughs earlier this morning, I found the girls rolling around almost in hysterics, pointing at a picture in the newspaper.

A quick glance didn’t show anything, but going back for I second look, there was a woman from a local counseling service appealing for volunteers to help.

Nice thought, but the accompanying picture showed her writing on a closed notepad, with her pen upside down!

‘R’ laughed as she said the first thing the volunteers needed to do was show her how open a notebook and use a pen!

So much for proofreading, and shame on the photographer for not picking her up on it when she asked her to pose.

Why does it matter? Well, here were three people out of the thousands who would read that article having a laugh at the expense of the subject of the article.

A well written article about a worthwhile subject had lost credibility with one simple (glaring) mistake: lack of attention to detail!

I’m always interested in good content, and if something is well written, I will stick around for ages reading, and make a point of coming back for more.

Poorly written material with bad grammar or a number of spelling mistakes are guaranteed to turn me off.

Another common mistake is to paste material into an article from somewhere else, without any bridging text to adapt it to the current article.

This can also lead to the problem of repeating content further down the page.

This is further evidence of lack of proofreading or editing.

It often seems to happen on certain news sites that are ‘hammering’ an issue by rehashing and refreshing old news stories.

I’m only one person, but as with the local newspaper, with potentially millions of readers able to access your site, you need to try and pay attention to detail.

Getting someone else to read it is always a good place to start, as they will usually see something out of place well before you do.

Of course, stuff still happens and things get through sometimes, no matter how hard you try.

I try to counter this by using the ‘preview’ feature, and checking to see how every thing looks before publishing.

Often times I will do this a couple of times, manually checking for errors (for example, a spell checker will show that adapt or adopt are spelled correctly, but can’t check the context).

I’m especially care if I am tired when I’m writing!

One last thing to note is your intended audience. There is the ‘English’ language, but there are British, US, Canadian and Australian variations as well.

Settle on one, and don’t switch between them on the one document.

Getting it right and looking professional gets easier with practice!

The competition is getting stronger all the time, and attention to detail adds to your credibility!

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