Yesterday was Winter Solstice, marking the shortest day of the year and the least amount of daylight.
Today, we’ll gradually start seeing more daylight – and even though it’s not New Year’s Day yet, a sense of new beginnings is already brewing.
Wishing you and yours the best for this holiday season – and all good things for 2017!
As I was setting up the background info and links in advance of writing my life with more cowbell blog post on Soulpepper’s upcoming production of It’s A Wonderful Life, I noticed that spell check was taking issue with my spelling of “It’s.” Spell check recommended “Its.”
Spell check was wrong about this common spelling mistake.
“It’s” is an abbreviation of “It is,” as in “It is a wonderful life.”
“Its” is the possessive of “it,” as in “Its life was wonderful.”
While spell check can be a useful tool to catch typos and grammatical errors, it’s (and that’s correct, spell check) far from perfect. So when spell check offers an alternative spelling, don’t automatically assume it’s right and you’re wrong.
Since I work mainly with Canadian clients, I use the Oxford Canadian Dictionary. Think of Canadian English as a hybrid of British and American English—“colour” and “centre,” but “organization” and “analyze.” And if a client has a style guide, I also use that as a reference. So spelling will be dictated by the client’s country of origin and any custom style conventions—conditions that spell check may not recognize.
Yet another example of why you need another pair of human eyes on your copy.
Happy holidays—and happy writing!
I was very happy and excited to launch the website for words with cowbell yesterday. After shouting it out on social media, a couple of friends* gave me the heads-up on some writing issues, one of which was a typo. Irritated with myself, I corrected it immediately.
This morning, while I was revising the other issue—an admittedly awkward turn of phrase—I noticed a second typo. And this one didn’t only appear on the website, it had been copied over from my one-page promo doc! I was mortified.
How could I expect people to trust me with their copy editing and writing needs when I was making mistakes with my own writing? After some moments of mental self-flagellation, I realized that this was a perfect example of why people need copy editors and proofreaders. You need another pair of eyes on your work.
For those of us who write—even those of us who are good at it and enjoy it immensely—we know in our hearts and minds what we want to say; and when we read it over, it looks perfectly fine. Sometimes, however, it may not appear on the page exactly as we’re seeing it. This is because we’re so close to it, and know it so well in our heads, that our minds fill in missing words and gloss over typos. And, let’s face it, life gets crazy busy and fatigue-related errors happen.
This is precisely why we need a second pair of eyes on our copy. Spell check, even if we remember to use it, is a good secondary support tool—but can only do so much. Your primary support needs to be another person reading your copy; preferably someone trained and/or experienced to do so.
Like I told myself this morning: Don’t be sorry, be better.
* With thanks to David Nicholson and John Oughton.
This is where I’ll be sharing tips, thoughts and ideas. Blog posts to come.
words with cowbell 