How To Keep Your Writing As Typo Free As Possible
Whether you are a blogger, an SEO expert or a programmer, typos can be the bane of your existence and a real challenge to eliminate. While you may be the very best writer in the world, occasionally your finger will slip while you’re typing or your brain will throw up an error.
It may be that you know full well the difference between ‘to’ and ‘too’, but when you’re tired and writing down your thoughts as they spring to mind it’s easy to have a momentary lapse that results in the wrong choice.
- For a programmer, this can result in bugs and glitches that take you hours to iron out.
- For a blogger or a webmaster, it can damage your reputation and your reliability.
- For SEOs meanwhile, it can lose you clients.
So what can you do? Read on to discover how to give your content the best chance of being error free. Sorry, ‘free’.
Don’t Type Tired
If you have some particularly important content to write, then you should make sure that you are writing it when you are wide awake and full of energy. Even just having a strong cup of coffee before you sit down to work can make a huge difference to your accuracy and you’ll find that it’s when you’re tired that the mistakes really start to creep in.
A good strategy is to write your most important content first, as that’s when you will be at the top of your game.
Use a Spellchecker
When you’re writing you should have two layers of defence to help combat typos. The first should be the real-time spell check that underlines your typos as you go, while the second should be the sequential spell check that you can run at the end to flag up anything you missed. Using real-time spell-check can make a great difference here to begin with as you should be able to spot and correct errors as you go (and it will actually improve your spelling over time too).
Don’t rely on it however, as most of us will still ignore certain things that get underlined when we’re really focused on what we’re typing. Going through the spell check at the end is a great way to catch those stragglers that might otherwise have made it through.
Read it Back
What’s most important of all though, is to read your content back to yourself after you have written it. This is the only way you will catch grammar mistakes such as ‘their and there’ (not a misspelling as far as Word is concerned as both words are legitimate) and the only way you’ll catch missing commas and factual errors.
The problem with reading your content back though, is that you may find you are too ‘close’ to the project to really be objective. What you need to do then for maximum effect, is to take a step back from your work and leave it for a few days, and then come back to read it later with ‘fresh eyes’. This way you will be far more likely to spot typos and to make little changes that polish your text up and make it more enjoyable to read.