A blgo a day (#5)

PROOFREADING

I always try to be meticulous in my writing. I try and ensure that my spelling is correct, the punctuation is appropriate, and the grammar is good, not necessarily excellent. With those as my guiding philosophy in writing, it is a natural extension that I check whatever I write and if I find anything that doesn't pass muster (in my own understanding of the language), I try and correct that to the best of my ability. I also have a tendency of pointing out mistakes in others' writing. Now this hasn't always ended well for me. When someone wants to write the way she wants to, why cast a magnifying glass on her writing and point out minor errors? Look for content and meaning in the writing, not the grammar! That is what I have heard people tell me. But habits die hard and I can't help but notice mistakes.

Proofreading means examining your text carefully to find and correct typographical errors and mistakes in grammar, style, and spelling. [1]

That is what experts tell me. Probably the operative word in the quoted sentence is "your", which I need to pay more attention to!

Nowadays, the word processing software tells us when it finds something not appropriate and puts a squiggly line below the word as a reminder to the writer to correct the word. One could also set the software to correct certain typical mistakes as one typed the passage and the software would do the correction for us. Back in the days of writing by hand, one needed to be careful while composing one's sentences to ensure that there weren't many mistakes, else the page would look awful with strikethroughs and asterisks to mark the corrections.

As a natural extension of my penchant for proofreading, I have a habit of fact-checking messages written or shared via email, Facebook, or WhatsApp. I point out the fact-checking results to the person who sent the message, and on occasions have been told that since the message looked fine, what was the harm in sharing the same? Mostly the issue is with wrong attribution of the message like the one below:

The message is appropriate, but in my opinion the attribution is wrong and needs pointing out. Lincoln and Internet? Bah!

By the way did you find anything wrong in the title of my blog? It is wrongly typed as "blgo". If you noticed it, you are my type; if not, don't worry, you may be very polite by nature.

 __________________________________________________ 

[1] https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/grammarpunct/proofreading/

Image from: http://abelincolnhistory.com/quotes/funny-lincoln-memes.htm