Introduction
Welcome to the last Red Pony Express for 2011, our 18th issue to date. We’ll be back in 2012 with more tips to improve your business communications.
In this issue we respond to a request from a reader to look at software packages for editors. Andrew reviews PerfectIt!, a handy tool for locating typos and errors in Microsoft Word documents.
I tackle the perennial problem of not budgeting for proofreading, while new contributor Kyra-Bae Snell explains why you should never use two spaces after a full stop, period.
On behalf of the Red Pony team I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all our readers the very best for the festive season and we look forward to seeing you in the New Year.
Happy reading ,
Peter
PerfectIt! editing software
Andrew Eather
Against our better judgement, Red Pony recently trialled a piece of editing software that, on the face of it, would seem to be our natural enemy.
PerfectIt! from Intelligent Editing claims to locate typos and grammatical errors in Microsoft Word documents – which is what the spell checker does already, I hear you say. Yes, this is true, but it also claims to detect other errors that ‘no spelling or grammar check will discover’.
What they are talking about is consistency, which can be one of the biggest headache-sources for editors. It turns out that PerfectIt! is actually a pretty useful tool for any document over about 20 pages long. It will search out inconsistent word hyphenations and capitalisations, variant abbreviation definitions, inconsistent heading capitalisation, and bullet capitalisation and punctuation.
While we use style sheets to keep our usage consistent and accurate when working with larger documents, it helps a great deal to be able to press a button at the end of the editing process just to check that no inconsistencies have slipped through the net.
PerfectIt! can’t help you rewrite a confused sentence, but it certainly can save you from the embarrassment of finding the same expression rendered three different ways through your document.
Why proofreading is not an optional extra
Peter Riches
When a prospective client recently contacted me and asked for a quote to proofread a set of large documents, naturally I was happy to oblige. After some further discussions to assist in compiling our standard project brief and carrying out a review of a sample document, we were able to estimate the time required and cost the project accordingly. I also provided a number of case studies from similar projects.
As it turned out, we didn’t win the project. The prospect told me that she had been impressed with our approach and had argued strongly in favour of accepting our proposal over that of our competitor, but was ultimately overridden by her manager. It turns out that the cost of proofreading the final documents hadn’t been factored in to the original project budget, so the manager wanted to go with the lowest price possible.
It’s probably worth mentioning that this isn’t the first time I’ve come across this situation. For some reason, editing and proofreading are often overlooked in project planning and costing, even when the final deliverable takes the form of a large printed document. Perhaps it has something to do with the largely invisible nature of our work. When it is done well, no one notices (nor should they) the work involved in editing and proofreading the content. When it is done badly, or not at all, everyone notices.
After all the hard work that goes into a project, if the documentation provided to the client contains spelling and grammatical errors, is poorly structured and generally difficult to read, it reflects badly on everyone involved, and the expense saved on proofreading may prove to be a greater cost in the long run.
If you type two spaces after a full stop, you’re wrong!
Kyra-Bae Snell
Despite its prevalence, using a double space at the end of a sentence is simply incorrect.
As with so many ‘truths’ it is not until we question their veracity that we can confidently change our ways. Nits do not prefer clean hair and they do not ‘jump’ from head to head because they don’t have knees. Fact. Typing two spaces at the end of a sentence is inarguably wrong. Fact.
In Farhad Manjoo’s blog in Slate he reveals the etymology of the double space lies in the inconsistencies of the early printing presses where style guides were not yet de rigueur. Once rules were established a single space was agreed upon and is now prescribed by every major style manual. So why is a double space still so common?
One of the reasons is my Nit Theory: the more a myth is perpetuated and reinforced, the more likely we are to send our children to school with dirty hair believing it will protect them from hordes of jumping lice. One of the other culprits is typewriters. Typewriters used monospaced type, where every character occupies an equal amount of space regardless of its size – an ‘I’ takes up the same amount of space as a ‘W’. As Manjoo explains this made it difficult to spot the spaces between sentences and hence the adoption of the two-space rule on a typewriter. However, monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s, along with the two-space rule and the practice of not wearing seat belts.
So now you can debunk two enduring myths: two spaces at the end of a sentence is wrong and nits don’t have knees.
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