by Sarah Torribio

Created on: April 01, 2009

One of the most important aspects of copyediting and proofreading is fact-checking. When you are dealing with a paper, story or manuscript, you want to look at those proper nouns. This is because nothing can make a writer lose credibility faster than a misspelled or incorrect name. Have you or the author of a piece you are editing used someone's name more than once? Compare each mention of the name. You'd be surprised how often the same writer will spell the same name differently.

Let's say you are dealing with a news story or book about politics, in which Democratic senator Evan Bayh factors prominently. Look through the draft to ensure that his name is spelled correctly and consistently. Slips of the keyboard and of the mind can result in many variations of names, e.g. Bahy, Bay, Bhay. . .you get the idea. If you're not sure how to spell the name, look online. The Internet has become an increasingly credible and rich source of information. There is a federal website that features a list, frequently updated, of the names of U.S. senators.

Who cares about how you spell Sen. Evan Bayh's name? Sen. Evan Bayh cares. Sen. Evan Bayh's Indiana constituents. People who have never heard of Evan Bayh but want to look up his name and learn more about him. People who have never heard of Evan Bayh but notice, with disgust, that his last name is spelled three different ways on one page. It matters.

I know this firsthand from my years as a journalist, writer and editor. I have worked for both student newspapers and local publications and know full-well the length of readers' memories. I know of several cases in which the subject of a story nurses a long-time grudge or sense of disappointment about a misspelled name. I've fielded phone calls from people upset that their parent's name was misspelled in an obituary. Oops! Huge oops. An obituary is one of those one-shot deals, which family members often clip and keep as a memorial to their loved ones. This makes a misspelling a near crime.

I have been the perpetrator of this crime, and it's always an embarrassment. A book review I posted on Helium has a name misspelled - not in the body of the story but in the title (even more outrageous). I misspelled Kurt Cobain's name as Curt Cobain and a reader wrote me a note excoriating my ignorance. You may be thinking, come on angry reader, get a life. However, this misspelling clearly mattered to this reader. In his life, Kurt Cobain figures as a hero. I got a low rating for the story as

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