Sunday, January 25, 2009
Week 4, Chapter 4: Revising and Proofreading
As you go about your usual business this week, keep your eyes open for errors in spelling, grammar and/or punctuation. What did you find, what is the error, what would be correct, and where did you see it? For example, last week I was at a professional development seminar. The speaker had a slide with two incorrect apostrophes in the same phrase. The phrase as written on the slide was “plaintiffs attorney’s.” Because the plaintiffs possess the attorneys and both nouns are plural, the phrase should have been written, “plaintiffs’ attorneys.” For inspiration, visit Boston’s Grammar Vigilante at http://thegrammarvandal.wordpress.com/
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I was applying for a job online and about to send my resume, I thought I should look over it one last time, good thing I did. I noticed that I had the year wrong on my last employer. Instead of 2008, I had 2208. Also, on my cover letter I spelled employee wrong. I spelled it employe. I am glad I took another look before I sent it out. A potential employer might not like the errors.
One error I found was in one of my school books. It was a true or false question. It said, "males and females same number of ribs." I am sure that there was supposed to be "have the" in there.
Another mistake was in a book I was reading. The character's name at the beginning of the book was Johnson, but changed to Johanson by the end. I would have thought someone would have caught it while proofreading.
Proofreading was the main topic in our Business Writing class this morning. We had a slide presentation that had spelling errors, which most of us caught immediately. It was interesting to have the errors appear in the presentation that was trying to relay the message of why proofreading was so important. The errors were an example of poor proofreading and because of this I will now be more conscience of the important steps I need to take in order to produce a great piece of work.
In Business Communication class, I was reminded of this blog assignment. Erica had written, “Analyze a information email”, rather than an information email. The other thing I noticed was another blogger misspelled the word “believe”. I know a lot of songs are worded wrong, but since I’ve had this class, they tend to stick out more. Toby Keith has a song where he refers to “she” and “they” in the same lyric even though he’s singing about a girl’s mother. When he refers to “they”, does he mean her mother and father? I’m not sure.
I am addicted to Facebook, and I have noticed so many errors on comments and such. I too am guilty of making grammatical mistakes just because it doesn’t necessarily matter if everything is correct. There is also a lot of slang used and just incorrect grammar in general. “hahahah llllllllllllllllemonade!
you shouold prolly put those pcitures up” This is one example of what someone wrote on my wall. First of all nothing is capitalized, a couple words are misspelled, and there are no punctuation marks. To make it correct, Ha-ha lemonade, you should probably put those pictures up.
I have noticed some errors in handouts in some of my medical classes this quarter. I realize that it is very important to proofread because by misspelling even one small word could change the entire meaning of the sentence.
During this week I have tried to find some errors in writing and grammar. However, the only ones I found were the ones that were presented to me in class on Wednesday January 29, 2009. I noticed that others had already commented on these and I felt that it would be rhetorical if I did the same. So what I did is find a website that is dedicated to this very topic. The site that I found is http://funnytypos.com/ . The heading of this site is “Funny Typos, Misspelling, Bad Grammar & Engrish”. After reading the posts on this site I was stunned to see how many of these were right here in America. They also show on the site what the person or business was trying to say, which in some cases is pretty humorous. I am not sure if other people have the same problem that I do, but I constantly overlook these spelling and grammar errors. Almost as if my brain unscrambles the wrong phrase, word, or grammar to have it make sense.
I found an error in my first blog. I did not capitilize my name. I was also sent a mailing last week spelling my last name wrong. It was spelled Harold instead of Herold.
I was cleaning out my junk-mail folder at work and discovered that almost all of the subject lines had errors in spelling and or punctuation. An example of these errors is, "Only here you can find solution to all your male troubles." Not only is solution missing an "s" but also the passive structure of the sentence makes it very confusing. The sentence should read, "You can only find solutions to all your male troubles here." This type of email subject line is not uncommon. I see this frequently in non-junk email, as well, which means this is a wide spread problem. As email, instant messaging, and other internet communication tools become more prevalent, I believe users will improve the quality of their written messages.
One of my pet peeves is grammar and/or spelling errors when it comes to websites. If your website portrays your business, I would think that you would want it free of errors in order to make a good impression on whoever may be visiting it. Perhaps, it may not be as habitual to check for errors when updating or changing a website, but just as things as magazines, books, newspapers, they should be checked for errors. I think it would be a good idea to also have someone read and check over your website beforehand, to change any errors. It doesn’t ever hurt to have someone else look at it. A funny story happened to my friend when he was called to a company to fix their issues with their email. It turns out that someone had misspelled their company’s name and was saved under the email as such. When others clicked on the email address it would not send out due to spelling. It took the employees and two other IT technicians to look at it before the mistake was caught. So, it’s never a bad idea to double check the spelling!
I have not noticed any grammar errors this week; however, last week I was reading a Wheat Thins box and noticed it says, “Wheat Thins is baked…” which sounds totally wrong. It seems like the sentence should say, Wheat Thins are baked…” I emailed Erica about this error and she as well did not know what the correct grammar would be. I think the box was probably right because of some confusing grammar rule. I also found this same form of grammar on the back of a Cheerios box, which reads, “Sure, Cheerios is great for kids…” After finding this on the first two boxes I looked at I would assume the grammar is correct. I do however think it is a really odd rule because it sounds so wrong.
During our recent safety meeting with the officer from Eau Claire, I noticed in his presentation slides that the word "been" was misspelled and that he had typed "Bee" and forgot the N. I did ask the Dean to let him know that there was a spelling error in his presentation, and that way he would not keep using the same slide. I don't know why it caught my eye the way it did, but it looked very unprofessional.
I know this is late, but I figured I would still do the assignment. I went back and looked over my last entry, and that is where I found my error. I used the word "throughout," but that time I spelt it "through out" when I should have spelt it "throughout."
Two days ago, I was revising my sister research paper and found a run on sentence. She has two complete sentences as one independent sentence. All she need to do is to put a period in between the two sentences. Everybody makes mistake so don't feel too bad for the mistake in grammar errors.
In high school I had a really big National History Day paper I had to finish. As usual I started and completed it in the same day, which happened to be the day before it was due. After the teacher finished reading them she told me she wanted to see me after class. She went through all of the errors I had and it looked like my paper was pure red. I even spelled my name wrong on the cover page. She told me she wanted me to redo my paper and turn it in for a late deduction. That has taught me the importance of proofreading. I am sure I would have caught more than half of the errors I made.
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