Some words have two perfectly acceptable spellings because English is wonderfully contrary like that. Make a choice and know why you opted for that choice in case anyone queries it. Here are the inconsistencies that cropped up most often. Use the find or find and replace tools to track down these distractions before they reach your readers. I’ve broken down the inconsistencies I’ve found across a mix of content. When your attention’s being yanked all which ways, where do you start? You need structure. So let’s get shot of them! Common inconsistencies in your marketing copy When you’ve heavily invested time and money in researching and writing your campaign copy, you don’t want to risk your readers spotting your oversights once it’s launched. And if you’re so focused on proofreading for typos and extra or missing words, you and your team might not notice the inconsistencies that slip through. If you’re working on copy from different contributors you’ll end up with a mix of styles in there. But if that’s your company style, I’ll be sure those commas are exactly where you want them. The Oxford comma? I can’t stand the thing unless it’s needed for clarity. We have our individual writing styles too. Two words, one meaning and both perfectly acceptable in British and American English. Your name and knowledge will soon be in the hands of your target audience and competitors.īut did you notice that both imposter and impostor had been used?
#COPY EM DASH ZIP#
You craft and hone and zip it up into an informative piece of content. You’ve typed up your own thoughts, gone deep into the research, copied notes from a few websites and asked a couple of colleagues to email you their own impostor experiences. Say you’re writing an article on imposter syndrome that’ll be printed in an industry magazine. Inconsistencies in and across your marketing materials tend to happen for two reasons: research and collaboration. Inconsistencies distract your audience from what you want them to do. But if their attention is diverted? It’s hard to get them back to that receptive state. You’ve crafted your copy to take your reader on a journey, to elicit a specific emotional drive. You’re not creating content for the fun of it. They were quite the rage in Miss Selfridge after that.) (Like that 2001 Steps song but without the corsets. And that brand image is built and communicated by your audience. You want your new and needed clients to trust your content so they trust your brand. Proofreading’s not just about spotting a too/to tangle, catching accidental ‘things are busty here’ mistypes or making sure a whole paragraph isn’t in there twice.Ĭontinuity is an equally important part of your proofreading quality control.
#COPY EM DASH FREE#
If you’re using free writing or proofreading tools, they might not be checking for inconsistencies in your copy. Grammarly does, but only if you pay for their premium version.
Spellcheck won’t always catch these issues if they’re not actually an error. And there’s a difference between straight and curly quote marks but both may be dotted across your work. Perhaps a product name is incorrectly abbreviated a couple of times in just one of the paragraphs in that juicy ABM content for your client – the paragraph a colleague put together for you. Maybe the spelling flits between the UK pyjamas and US pajamas, or some dates might be written as 1 April 2020 and others as 1st April 2020. Inconsistencies in our copy are where we’ve used something in more than one way. I’ve listed those ten common inconsistencies in your marketing copy so you can catch them too. Little discrepancies that had slid on in unnoticed. They were scattered between plenty of other edits. As I scrolled through industry reports, guides, white papers, web copy and even fashion product listings (that pink’s not fuschia – it’s fuchsia!), those confusable words and accidental typos weren’t the only things that popped out. The other day I worked my way through a year’s worth of my clients’ copy to find the most regularly confused words.
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