Aooccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are in the rghit pclae.
While spelling and grammar brainteasers can be fun to work out, there’s no joy in finding mistakes in your important stakeholder documents after they’ve been released – in print or online.
And it’s so easy to miss what later seems obvious. Just consider the recent $50 note fiasco.
When we read, we read words as whole units, not as individual letters. That’s why we can easily read the opening paragraph. Our brain uses our experience of English to make assumptions about what’s coming next. The flipside is that sometimes our assumptions are wrong.
And the longer and more complicated the document, the harder it gets. You’ll know that the risk of mistakes occurring grows exponentially the greater the number of people involved in the document’s production.
Whilst a proofreader cannot guarantee the amount of time and stress they will save you (although we can guess), they will guarantee to find inconsistencies and errors that no one else has noticed.
Here are a few examples of typos we’ve discovered when proofreading annual reports for Australia’s leading listed companies:
- The bank announcing record shareholder divideds.
- The team singing a global agreement.
- And then there was the iconic business that’s proud to be Australain.
When you’ve invested time and energy in copywriting and designing a first-class corporate document, you can’t afford mistakes. That’s why hiring a professional proofreader is risk assurance for your brand.