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Error-free documents help you avoid embarrassment

When writing something others will read, poor grammar and spelling mistakes can be embarrassing. Furthermore, errors can undermine all the time and effort you’ve put into a piece of writing.

Avoid damage to your reputation

Poor attention to grammar can damage your reputation. Benjamin Franklin said, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation and only one bad one to lose it”. Error-free documents are possible. Whether you’re writing a newsletter or content for your website, attention to detail is worth the effort.

Protect your credibility

People will judge you and your business on what they see. If you’re similar to many other businesses, your website functions as your ‘shop front’. This is the first opportunity you have to sell yourself to a new client/customer. You want them to believe you are capable, competent and worthy of their custom. Don’t let errors in your writing affect your credibility.

Safeguard your authority in your field of expertise

If you want to set yourself up as an expert in your field, you’ll want to present a professional, clean image to your clients. Documents that are error free will contribute to this image.

Save money

When writing documents that specify policies, guidelines, procedures, expectations and contractual issues, a spelling mistake or a simple comma in the wrong place can be costly. It could be advisable to engage a lawyer to ensure your important contracts are watertight—mistakes in these can be expensive.

Ensure your writing communicates your intended message

Clarity in communication is critical. Often, you’ll only get one opportunity to get your message across to your customer—make sure it’s the right message. In advertising, newsletters, and in other business documents, ensure there are no mistakes in your writing that might leave your intended message open to a different interpretation.

Finally: review, review, review—a fresh set of eyes can pick up things you may have missed. As the author, not only will you often read what you intended rather than what you actually wrote, you could be making a mistake you are simply unaware of. No amount of checking by yourself will pick up on errors you don’t even realise you’re making.

Using a proofreader will help you create error-free documents and avoid the above problems.

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As you write, you’ll no doubt end up at some stage with titles and headings. Chapter headings, report headings, articles, etc. can all cause you to stop and ask yourself, “Which words in this title should be capitalised?” Here’s a simplified set of rules that I hope will help.

Golden Rule

Capitalise the first and last words—always. This “golden rule” trumps all others.

Capitalise

All nouns and pronouns (this includes smaller words such as it and he).
All verbs (including is and be).
Adjectives and adverbs—all of them.
That. (That can work as different parts of speech).
Conjunctions that are four letters or more (such as with, since and because).
Prepositions that are five letters or more (such as beside, toward and beneath).
The first letter following a hyphen or a dash—although this is optional . . . it’s a question of style preference.
For example: Re-enter or Re-Enter: You could use either. However, I prefer to use another rule: Apply the standard rule to the word following the hyphen. In this example, as enter is a verb, it should be capitalised. If you applied the same rule to how-to, you would write it How-to, as to is a preposition of less than five letters.

Do Not Capitalise

Conjunctions with fewer than four letters (such as and, but and or).
Prepositions with fewer than five letters (such as on, of and over).
Articles (such as the, a, and an).
As and to.
The first letter following a colon (unless it’s a proper noun). In some American Styles, capitalisation is acceptable where the colon introduces a complete sentence.

Remember

Sometimes the same word can act as different parts of speech. This may affect your decision on whether or not to capitalise it.

For example, in these two sentences below, the word up is first a preposition (which should not be capitalised as it’s a preposition with fewer than five letters) and then an adverb (which you should capitalise as all adverbs are capitalised).

Running up the Mountain (preposition)
Running Up to the Summit (adverb)

If you’re unsure of a word’s part in speech, try Google or a dictionary. If you’re still not sure, and if it looks strange to you in lowercase, then capitalise it.

Reference: The McGraw-Hill Desk Reference for Editors, Writers and Proofreaders.

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