Janric Website Design

Whether you are building websites, posting to your blog, advertising or writing articles, then it is absolutely vital that you carefully proof read your work. And it can be well worth getting someone else to give it the final once over.

And recently this was displayed beautifully to me whilst booking a holiday rental for a week. It sounds a harmless activity and we found an ideal apartment to rent. But, the description did include the sentence:

“Located opposite the famous playing fields of St Paul’s School in a quiet but pretty central but predominantly residential, area of South-West London, you will have easy access to the centre if that is your gaol, but be able to escape.”

Did you spot the mistake?
Now read that again if you did not spot the mistake! It is very easy to miss (especially for those who are used to American spellings), but the last few words definitely talk about “gaol” (rather than “goal”) and making an escape.

Maybe the apartment’s owner has a sense of humour (I’ll find out – we did book the ‘gaol’), but more likely she has typed up the sentence, checked for spelling mistakes and quickly read over it again to make sure that it does make sense.

The importance of proof reading, carefully and slowly!
This is just one of the many words in the English language that if you make a simple mistake on a couple of letters the meaning changes completely. And in this circumstance, talking about a holiday letting as a gaol does not really do it any favours!

And that is the problem with proof reading your own work. If you read your own work you are liable to assume that the correct word is written down at that point in the sentence just because it has not been highlighted as a spelling error. You need to take your time and if the correct wording is important have someone else read over it for you and highlight your errors.

It is not just errors like this one they might pick up on. There are also punctuation rules and grammar problems where you might think you have used the correct term, but have not. For example, “to many people” and “too many people” are both valid, but in totally different contexts. You might know which one to use, but that can lull you into a false sense of security when you proof read it and you can miss the problem.

If a piece of writing is important then don’t just give it a cursory glance for highlighted spelling errors. Get someone else to give it the once over to make sure that any hidden mistakes are picked up and the finished work will look a lot better.

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