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Give It a Rest!

October 2008

A misspelled or misplaced word does not negate the worth of a whole document. A grammatical error does not indicate that the writer is uneducated or unable to write. It is simply a boo-boo. And anyone who writes frequently will tell you that an individual cannot be held responsible for finding every little error in a document.

Finding mistakes is an iterative PROCESS that involves multiple steps and multiple sets of eyes.

This newsletter is a plea to give editors and writers a break! And I have good reasons why you should lighten the heck up!

Three phases of editing

First of all, there are three different phases or types of editing. And each type of editing requires different talents.

And when I wrote a book for McGraw-Hill called Accounting Demystified, I experienced these three phases of editing first-hand.

1. Editing for organization—the first round of New York editors who reviewed my book were the organization editors. Their job was to ensure that my writing made sense and was organized in the most reader friendly and logical way. Their editing comments were mostly comprised of “What are you trying to get at here, Leita?” “I don’t understand this paragraph.” “How about you move this to the beginning of the next chapter? It doesn’t seem to fit here.”
2. Editing for readability—the second round of editors looked at readability issues. They encouraged me to cut back on the size of my paragraphs, use parallel structures in my bullet lists, and simplify my language.
3. Editing for mechanical correctness—these folks were responsible for making sure that the words were spelled correctly, that the proper punctuation was used, that the right verb tense was used, etc.

These editors were not all the same person because it takes different talents to conduct each phase.

Personally, I am confident when editing a document for organization. But finding spelling errors is not my thing.

But there are people in the world for which a spelling error simply jumps from the page.

Someone on your team has the talent—the God-given gift—of being able to see grammatical, spelling, and typographical errors. Sometimes I am beset by these talented folks in my classes, they look at my PowerPoint slides and have a field day pointing out errors. Right now, the folks with this talent have already seen three things in this document that need correcting.

But it is very common for folks to be blind to their own errors once they have written a document. I know that I can’t see my own errors. Even after my second, third, and fourth read-through, I still miss typos.

Even the talented screw-up sometimes

Even those talented in grammar miss errors. The first edition of my McGraw-Hill book was ripe with silly grammatical errors that should have been caught by their team of editors. Yes, you are right, accounting isn’t exactly a compelling topic—but they weren’t supposed to be reading for content!

My husband wrote a simple children’s story, containing only 150 words. We sent it through three editors, one of whom is a professional children’s book editor. And guess what? It still has an error.

Scrub-a-dub-dub

What do you do about this? You send important documents through multiple editors with a wide variety of talents and visions. One person cannot do it all. And they should not be expected to.

In order to short-circuit this very human tendency to miss writing errors, you have to scrub the document thoroughly.

I recommend that you do all of these things before you issue your report:

• Run spelling and grammar check
• Put it away for a few days and read it again
• Send it through a trusted colleague and ask for feedback about the content
• Read your own writing out loud—very slowly—and include the punctuation.

So reading the above sentence would sound like, “Capital ‘R’, read your own writing out loud, dash, very slowly, dash, and include the punctuation, period.” I find plenty of errors this way.

• Send it through another colleague who writes clearly and simply for feedback on your word choice and other readability issues.
• Have someone talented in typo detection read your stuff.
• Have another person talented in typo detection read your stuff.
• Still worried? Have someone in your office read the report to you BACKWARDS. Yes, backwards. Each punctuation mark and capital letter needs to be read. So the preceding sentence sounds like, “Period, read be to needs letter capital and mark punctuation each capitalized.” It is a lot of work, but you will see spelling errors that the spell check didn’t see (like loose vs. lose. their vs. there, or medicinal vs. medical. We have all suffered from these, some of us famously!)

And sometimes no matter what you do, it still contains an error

We auditors know better than to pick on individuals! We know that good products are produced by good processes. Please give your editors a break. Set them up for success by defining who does what type of editing and how many edits are done before a report is published.

A grammar or spelling error does not indicate that the writer is an idiot. Only that they didn’t scrub the document enough.

Obviously there is a point at which the scrubbing goes too far. You have gone too far when you build 20 steps into a process and each document takes hours over weeks and months to get out the door.

Lighten up—allow a few errors to exist. Don’t let the drive for perfect writing drive your team absolutely crazy and keep them from doing their real job—taking on and mitigating risk.