Your Spell Check just bounced: 3 tips for copy editing

Language errors can be embarrassing. Here are some useful ways to avoid these awkward situations.

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Copy editing is a tough business. You have to know every grammar rule or suffer the wrath of hundreds of emails flooding your inbox, warning you of the misplaced comma in your article. At times, it’s worse than just a missing comma; sometimes, one typo can give your message an entirely different feel. Staffers for the Rick Santorum campaign will back me up on this. An email went out with one missing letter in the subject line, and it changed the entire tone of the message. Usually, when there is a minor typo in your press release or your email, you can simply resend a corrected email. The typo below was less fortunate. It quickly appeared on social media sites and then spread to news sites.

Both of these mistakes can be avoided in the future with three simple tips. 1. Read your story backwards. Often, it’s easy to miss a typo when you’re reading a sentence because your mind will fix it for you. You know what the sentence is suppose to say, such as:

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