I’ve been highlighting the spelling and grammar rules that often get forgotten, leading to mistakes in written work. There are other culprits.
I’ve mentioned that social media encourages us to post in a hurry, without checking what we’ve typed. Today I was working on the back end of my website, trying to make the portfolio easier to navigate and my wireless keyboard was having a field day!
Admittedly, I was sitting at an awkward angle from the computer, which is itself tucked away, challenging the tech on an ordinary day (one day I’ll get round to optimising my work station…), but this morning it was going to town! It knew I’d typed a double letter but wasn’t sure which one; or it skipped a couple of letters I had typed and added a random one of its own. If I had been typing in a word processor, and working on standard prose text, that might have picked up the issue for me but, to be honest, spell check is shaky on URLs at the best of times, so in this instance it didn’t stand a chance!
It’s very fortunate for me that I have eyes like a hawk when it comes to typos, but what can you do if you don’t? That’s right, proofread. Proofread everything and test your links. It’s so easy to overlook a URL or email address but these are the most crucial things of all! In my case, this morning, I would have made myself look incompetent if my links hadn’t worked. In normal text, I might have lost clients who were following a link to a nonexistent website or email address and got fed up with not finding the site or getting no response to their message.
Business is competitive and a quick check is so easy to do, you really have no excuse for losing out this way.