As a professional writer/editor, you would think that I would never make a mistake in my own writing, right? After all, I spend my working hours carefully critiquing the work of others for spelling and grammar errors, so my own writing should, by nature, be picture perfect. Right? Unfortunately, not so much.

Just this morning, I fired off an email to a client, a fellow writer whose work I regularly proofread and edit. When I read her response, I happened to glance down at my original email and – oh, the horrors – stumbled across a glaring grammatical error. One that my little red pen (or, rather, Microsoft Word’s little red tracked changes marker) would quickly catch in a client’s article, web copy, etc. But there it sat, overlooked and dangling in cyberspace for all the world too see (okay, not all the world, but an important client, whose confidence in my editing abilities could have easily been shaken).

So, the point is that I made a mistake – a simple mistake that could have easily been caught had I taken the time to proofread my own work. Nobody’s perfect, so if you catch a mistake, chock it up to a learning experience and do everything you can to avoid messing up in the future.

Let me clarify: I don’t mean to say that you have a free pass to the sheer laziness that I faced this morning. The next time you’re sending an email or other semi-informal document to a client, PLEASE don’t make my mistake. Clients notice these things. And if your writing something that is going to be published for all the world to see (like an article, blog post, website copy, etc.), you might want to consider asking a trusted friend, colleague, or professional editor to look it over first. Takes a little more time, sure, and maybe a small investment, but the end results are worth it.

Tip of the day: Find a business buddy to proofread your writing, and you in turn can proofread theirs. It can be near impossible to catch our own mistakes, so having another set of eyes can never hurt. And if you work out a you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours type of deal, everybody wins.

Bonus: Can you catch the two grammatical errors in this blog post? Yes, I put them in there on purpose…you better believe I’m going to be checking and triple-checking my writing from now on! If you catch them, reply directly to this post or email me at tammim at writeassociate.com.