Don’t let the little ones get away

Watch out for the tiddlers

We  make the biggest effort to check complicated words that are tricky to spell but so often overlook the little ones that have drifted from, say, ‘or’ to ‘of’. We’ll have been concentrating our proofreading efforts on more challenging words – take something like ‘accommodate’. We’ll make sure we’ve got two ‘ccs’ and two ‘mms’ because we know that’s an easy one to get wrong.

Or if we mention McDonalds, we’ll double-check that spelling, knowing you can buy a Big Mac from the place although there’s never been an ‘a’ in the company’s name. It’s a helpful hint for getting the spelling spot-on.

But…and take it from someone who proofreads every day, the mistake we make time and time again is to forget to check the easy-peasy tiny words we can spell in our sleep/with our eyes shut/without even thinking about them.

And we’re so focused on making sure the body copy reads perfectly the howlers sometimes appear in the headline of the piece. It’s a fact of writing life: people tend to overlook headlines, subheads and captions when they proofread.

Much as I’d like a proofreader to be hired for any job that involves words I can see it isn’t happening. That being the case it’s wise to write your content, save it as a draft, walk away, have a cup of tea and read it again 30 minutes later. You’ll be surprised what you discover and your copy will be all the better for it.

Always – but always – be wide-eyed and alert when you see words like:

• is
• it
• if
• in
• up
• us
• of
• off
• on
• to
• too
• he
• her
• here
• you
• your
• for
• four

To name a very few…

It’s not easy to unsubscribe!

I have no idea why I get half the emails I do.

I don’t want new tyres because I don’t have a car, I don’t speak Spanish so someone’s misread my French surname, anything ‘free’ is only going to make me give away more info and invite more emails so I’m not going to do that, I don’t gamble and of all the cheap offers I want, I DON’T want cut-price eye surgery! The list goes on…

Often I just delete the stuff and motor on with the day.

Sometimes, though, I try to clean up my machine by properly unsubscribing from the stuff but it’s not easy, is it. They don’t want you to go so they make it seem a lot more difficult to unsubscribe than it was to subscribe in the first place (if, indeed, you did anyway.)

The following form is a case in point – with the subscribed bits already ticked!:

>

Other attempts are a little less sophisticated. A message will pop up asking ‘Did you unsubscribe by accident?’ That’s highly unlikely, isn’t it. In fact I wonder if anyone has actually done that – scrolled to the bottom of an email, managed to select the ‘unsubscribe’ option that always seems to be in tiny four-point (light) and clicked on it accidentally!

In those cases, I’d like there to be a facility for me to be able to add ‘No, actually, I’ve made a lot of effort and I’m very, very definite about my decision.’

At the other end of the scale there are systems in place which are far more elaborate than the one I’ve illustrated. In the first instance they’ll ask me to give reasons for unsubscribing: Am I receiving too many emails? Am I no longer interested? Or is there another reason? And then (when I’ve ignored all of that) they tell me they’re still not letting me go because they have two special offers that I can’t resist (I can, though!) and therefore they’ll continue to mail me.

Am sure that’s breaking some privacy law somewhere but am too busy to work it out and anyway it added neatly to this blog.

Scraping the World Cup barrel!

The World Cup’s been forced on me like never before this year – the new man in my life is football bonkers and has done his utmost to try to interest/educate me in the event.
But I don’t mind. To be honest I find the whole fiasco quite funny – if a bit sad at times – and I could always go and do something useful if I was really that bothered.
Actually it fascinates me: footballers crying because they’ve fallen over, fans crying because the ‘wrong’ team has scored too many goals, commentators getting stupidly excited when a goalkeeper saves a goal (isn’t that the one and only job goalkeepers have to do???)
Anyway, safe to say, I’ve watched a fair bit of the competition which of course has hit news headlines as well as dominated sports pages.
However I think it’s a bit much – and scraping the barrel – when the media looks at the World Cup in terms of fashion! I came across a blog today detailing World Cup kits http://bit.ly/U5jXqc. There were 53 photos in all – captioning AND rating kits. While I didn’t study them, it seems that others may have judging by comments such as ‘I like the Russian one, the French one doesn’t do much though.’ I can just about get my head around people loving the sport but not caring about the kit!
And hot on the heels of seeing that, along comes another blog about World Cup footballers’ tattoos. I skimmed that to see if there were any interesting ones. I’ll give you the link and leave it to you to decide. http://bbc.in/U5kad4
But what’s odd there is that while they headline the piece ‘tattoos of TEN World Cup stars’, they only find NINE. Now that’s what you call a scraping-the-barrel type of feature!