A Quality Reputation
You've misspelled a client's name in your newest project proposal. The presentation you spent hours perfecting still contains multiple typos your brain skipped over. Your website is full of outdated or incorrect information.
The thing about mistakes is you don't know you've made them until— well, until you know you've made them. Chances are typos and misinformation occur in your business documents more often than you realize. Your most forgiving readers may wonder about the quality of your work. The least forgiving will just move on to a competitor.
Mistakes will damage your credibility The Washington Post's Ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, understands all too well how an organization's reputation can be damaged when typos and errors are not caught before a publication is released to the public. Alexander's job is to take in subscriber complaints, and in a recent column titled ""Fewer Copy Editors, More Errors," he laments the recent abundance of mistakes like these: A story on Arlington County's plans for the old Newseum building misspelled Rosslyn as "Rossyln" four times. A column about plans to fire a federal employee said he had "spitted" (instead of spat) on his boss. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter was described as a "ferocious" (instead of voracious) reader. A photo caption mistakenly referred to a boy with the odd first name of "Jacon" instead of "Jacob" (clue: "b" is next to "n" on the keyboard). Alexander explains the shortage of copy editors now at the Post, due to cost-cutting measures. But fewer copy editors checking each article before print means more bad news for an already struggling industry: Little mistakes take a huge toll on credibility. A groundbreaking newspaper industry study on credibility a decade ago warned that "each misspelled word, bad apostrophe, garbled grammatical construction, weird cutline and mislabeled map erodes public confidence in a newspaper's ability to get anything right." Alexander's warning doesn't just apply to newspapers. Misspellings, factual errors, and poorly constructed writing can erode public confidence in any organization's ability to get things right. And the competition is just waiting to profit from your mistakes. Quality assurance for your documents If you're looking to improve your reputation for quality, here are four reasons why our proofreading and editing services may be the right answer for you: 1. The spell-checker on your word processing program will not catch all of your mistakes. It won't catch misused words, factual errors, or a poorly constructed paragraph that obscures your message. Our professional proofreaders and writing experts will. 2. The more familiar a person is with what a piece of writing is supposed to say, the less likely they are to catch what it does say. Distance from the project can help someone notice errors, which is why an outside proofreader can catch what you or others in your office might miss. 3. The brain tends to automatically correct what it reads, so employing effective proofreading techniques is important for catching all of a document's errors. Our associates know how to make sure that every headline, paragraph, table, and caption is error-free. 4. Four eyes are better than two. No document leaves our office until at least two associates have checked it, even if it is only a page long. We know that developing—and keeping—a reputation for quality is critical to your success. For all of your document and writing needs, we've got your back.
