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 stakeholder documents, just after you have published and distributed them – in print or online.
Here are a few we’ve discovered in documents from Australia’s leading listed companies:
- There was the bank that was announcing record shareholder divides
- There was the team singing a global agreement.
- And then there was the iconic business that’s proud to be Australain.
Usually mistakes in reports, PDSs, brochures, tenders and proposals are a small embarrassment, but sometimes they cost in redesign, reprint, re-uploading or mailing, not to mention the extra time.
Let’s go back to the opening paragraph. You could read every word because we read words as whole units, not as individual letters. Our brain uses our experience of English to make assumptions about what’s coming next. The flipside is that sometimes our assumptions are wrong. That’s why people occasionally miss typos when they’re proofreading, especially if it’s a document they’ve written or edited themselves.
And the longer and more complicated the document, the harder it gets.
When you have invested time and energy in copywriting and designing a first-class corporate document, you can’t afford mistakes. That’s where proofreaders come in.