I’ve been noticing a lot of errors in semantics across blogs and even articles by major media outlets lately. And emails, too.
Sentences that make no sense at all because one word was mistyped or auto-corrected without the author realizing. That word will be skipped by spell checkers and well, I haven’t seen grammar checkers outside of MS Word*.
That one misused word makes all the difference in figuring out what you are intending to say and how professional you will appear to be. It’s distracting. I spend time trying to figure out the intended word so I can piece the two sentence fragments together.
Authors are either not having someone take a look at their work before publishing or someone is having a look but they are doing it on a screen.
I’m making the correlation that we tend to scan paragraphs on a screen and miss potential errors when proofing. Printing your text out on paper makes proof reading more effective.
Sometimes I read the text backwards. From ending to beginning. This way I’m looking at the words in case any of them sticks out.
I know we work in a tight deadline, overworked, not-enough-hours-in-the-day and Google-ate-my-brain world, however, showing your work to another set of eyes needs to be part of the digital publishing process.
I came across three such misused words in my blog post alone as I was proofing.
*On second thought, maybe there are grammar checkers in other programs and I just don’t know about them?