by Simon Wright

Created on: May 27, 2007

Eliminating spelling and grammatical errors may be important either if you are studying for an academic or professional qualification, or if you are sending a report, presentation, or e-mail to either a senior manager or a client whose business you are trying to secure.

The first thing that you should do is to use your computer's automated spelling and grammar checks. However, be aware that there are some limitations to these packages. For example, if you're based in the UK but your spellcheck package is in US English then it won't like words such as 'organisation', or 'cheque'!

Some of the other things you can do include:

1. Read lots. The more exposure you have to words, the better your spelling and hopefully your grammar will become.

2. Get a friend or colleague to check your documents. If you know someone who is good with words, then they may be able to help you with some of the elements that you find difficult.

3. Enrol for a course. This may be particularly pertinent where English is not a person's first language.

4. Buy a dictionary or use an online dictionary. If you're unsure of a word's spelling or meaning, then a dictionary should resolve this.

5. Always review your writing before submitting it. Apart from anything else, we often find that our writing contains instances of words that have been mistyped; such as 'teh'! Ideally, you want to be free of distractions when going through the review/editing phase, although this is sometimes not possible.

6. For important proofreading, get the help of a friend.
Let's imagine that you've taken your product's standard terms and conditions and you've added them to your website. Your web designer has passed you a copy of the test web page, and you need to make sure that the copy exactly matches what is in your written terms and conditions. In this kind of instance, it may be desirable to get a colleague to read out the standard terms and conditions, whilst you read the web copy to make sure it's correct. Otherwise you have to switch eye content between two fairly word heavy documents which is usually where mistakes creep in!

These days, in business, I think that increasingly a blind eye is being turned to some basic grammatical errors; the most common example is probably the absence of an apostrophe where possession is being denoted - e.g. 'Peters ball' rather than 'Peter's ball'. This, in part, is probably due to the trend of mobile texting. However, there remain lots of people who were brought up to think that grammatical correctness is associated with intellectual level, so it is still worth endeavouring to get your grammar and spelling right. You never know, it could be the difference between your company being awarded a contract or being rejected.

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