4 tips to annihilate typos
When I write, I do a lot of mistakes of all sorts, particularly crazy stupid ones. English is not my first language; French is. But this doesn’t explain the why, since I make as many in French. As an entrepreneur I need to write a lot (emails, blog posts, tweets, Github issues) and mistakes are always biting my ass and hitting at my credibility and my ability to communicate clearly. I hate them. That’s why I’ve developed a set of techniques to help me alleviate them, here they are:
1. Take your time
Probably not the one you wanted to hear first, but so effective! Before hitting the publish button, wait a few minutes, change your mind, do something fun, only then, come back to proofread your text, you will find many stupid errors that went under the radar. The brain is a muscle that needs to be relaxed from time to time to be efficient, at least for me.
2. Make your computer read the text
I often mix up words having similar pronunciation. For example, I could write “find create partners” instead of “find great partners”. Once I notice them they look completely stupids, but I can literally proofread my text 10 times without spotting them. My ultimate trick to track them is to let my computer read my text aloud. Read/listen to the following examples to see how effective it is, although they may seem a bit over the top those are all real typos I made hidden in long text.
this pattern took a while to growth on us (this pattern took a while to grow on us)
find create partners (find great partners)
have a great gay (have a great day) 😳😱
To use this as often as possible you can assign a system shortcut, in my case Command + Shift + R keys. Every time I select a text on my computer and press those keys, my Mac reads the text aloud. Here is how to set this up in OS X:
3. Augment yourself with a grammar checker
I currently use grammarly.com, a subscription-based online grammar checker. Even though it’s not as good as I would like, the checker helps me find around 50% of my errors. In a business context where credibility is important, this is enough for me to justify the steep monthly price. Do you know any other good checkers?
Grammarly offers a convenient Google Chrome extension that lets you spell check text you have written in any inputs and text areas. However, it doesn’t always work, like here on Medium, it will corrupt the document and prevent you from saving it… which is a big bummer (it forces you to copy/paste your text back and forth to have it spell checked).
Get peer review
This is the less productive trick but the most effective one; let your friends and colleagues review your text. They will catch most of the typos your brain kept hiding from you and even suggest changes to make your text better.
The best tool I found to collaborate on text is the web based word processor, Google Doc. It lets you share a text document and do live edition with peers. A particularly useful feature is the Suggesting mode where your reviewers edits become suggestions you can accept, comment or refuse.
What I write the most are business emails, but copy/pasting drafts in Google Doc to get peer review doesn’t cut it, it’s too long. That’s where Missive comes into play, an email client built with collaboration in mind. With Missive getting your draft peer-reviewed is productive because it happens right inside the email app. To ask for review you just need to @mention one or many of your colleagues in the draft’s comment box. Your colleagues will be able to edit your draft. You can even ask them to send the email once they have reviewed it.
Disclaimer: I’m a cofounder at Missive. Eat your own dog food they say; my typos were one reason we started the project.
What are your tricks to improve the quality of your writings? I’m genuinely interested, share them with me on Twitter, @plehoux.
If you want to try out Missive with your team follow this link to get your invite.
