The Ten Most Frequent Proofreading Mistakes  

By Joe Haddad

 

Imagine sitting down at a nice restaurant only to look at the menu and find that today’s special is “Crap-stuffed sole.” Most diners would prefer CRAB as the owner found out much to the establishment’s embarrassment. 

 

Each year, small businesses and large corporations lose millions of dollars in time and money due to errors in print materials. Beyond the monetary costs, there are other serious consequences including recalls of instructions and manuals, customer disputes due to inaccurate product information and loss of credibility with the company or person coordinating the print materials. 

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In print communications, errors typically occur in two main areas: 1) in document prepress in which formatting can create layout and type problems and 2) proofreading of the final proof. We encourage our customers to carefully proofread every layout that is being turned over to a printer. Layout changes often are easy to fix, but once a document reaches the printing press there is no turning back.

 

The difference between proofreading and editing

To avoid embarrassment and wasting money on less-than-perfect print communications, it’s essential to both edit and proofread your project before having it printed. Editing is done upon completion of your first draft to make sure it is accurate and well written. In the editing process, you should check such things as transitions between paragraphs, grammar, accuracy of claims, facts and figures, sentence and paragraph structure, writing style, wordiness, clarity and verb tense agreement. Proofreading follows editing to double check for typos and misspellings, punctuation, inconsistencies, formatting problems and missing words.

 

The number of errors appearing in print materials is escalating, we believe, due to over reliance on electronic spell-checks and the faster pace of business in general. Following are the most frequent proofreading mistakes seen by print specialists in one of the world’s largest printing franchises in North America.

 

Frequent, and costly, proofreading mistakes

1. Numbers that are transposed or page number inconsistencies.
2. Typos in headlines.
3. Errors in names, addresses, phone numbers and Web sites.
4. Incorrect choice of similar words (i.e. “there” instead of “their,” “effect” instead of “affect” or “principle” instead of “principal”).
5. Missing quotation marks, words or lines of text.
6. Extra commas, symbols or letters within the text.
7. An incorrect letter that creates a new word (i.e. “crab” instead of “crap”).
8. Using incorrect days and dates (i.e. Wednesday, December 10 is actually Tuesday, December 10).
9. Forgetting to include important contact information such as company name and phone number, which is a critical error when the print communications requires a follow-up response.
10. Incorrect use of contractions (i.e. “it’s” instead of “its” or “you’re” instead of “your”).

 

Before your project begins, you should have in place an internal sign-off procedure that identifies who in the company is responsible for reviewing print communications. Your proofreading process should include multiple individuals and never only one. For more proofreading tips, contact your print consultant.