Why communicators should enlist the help of proofreaders
Clean, accurate copy is crucial for your credibility—and career. How about baking a quality-control fee into your efforts and hiring an editor?
When a reporter sees a mistake in an email pitch, it’ll probably get deleted.
Worse, it could end up on Twitter for your clients and the world to see.
PR pros are expected to be many things: a storyteller with Hemingway’s chops, Pulitzer Prize-winning wordsmith, well-connected media maven, therapist and psychic—not to mention a social media savant, content strategist, Google analytics algorithms expert and data scientist.
No wonder PR was just rated the eighth-most-stressful job in the U.S.
Even though words are our business, the editing and proofreading phase often falls short.
We miss things—especially if we wrote it. How often, for example, have we overlooked a double “the”? Unfortunately, mistakes often rear their ugly heads after we’ve hit “send.”
In a perfect world, all PR and marketing agencies would have experienced proofreaders.
That task is usually left up to account executives, publicists, interns—even the receptionist. (At my agency, we stopped short of cornering the Fed Ex guy in the hallway.) This happens because most agencies probably consider an onsite, full-time proofreader a luxury.
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