Be Your Own Proofreader

A while back I was browsing the threads on my favourite internet forum. Some hapless fool had made the mistake of posting a thread advertising himself as a teacher of English. Needless to say, the post contained some mistakes, whether they were typos or not I can’t remember and this brought the usual guffaws from the forum regulars who have nothing better to do with their time. One of these guys posted this remark,

“Well, making those sort of mistakes won’t exactly install confidence in your pupils”

The phrase he was looking for was, of course, “instill confidence”. I discreetly PM’d the guy pointing out that he had used the wrong phrase so that he could nip in, make an edit and not make a fool of himself. Making mistakes in English when trying to ridicule someone is not a great strategy. I shouldn’t have bothered. The guy said that he was a proofreader and knew what he was talking about.

If I’d known about Brians' Errors at the time I could have pointed him in the direction of this page. Instead I told him to Google it (my apologies for using Google as a verb). Google is a very quick way of determining how popular a word is on web pages and hence in the real world. However, if you simply search Google for install confidence followed by instill confidence you might be fooled into thinking that installing confidence is a perfectly valid concept. The key here is to make sure that when searching Google for a phrase make sure you enclose the phrase in quotation marks, thus otherwise Google will search for the words in your phrase individually rather looking for the phrase as a whole.

Some people just don’t take criticism well, no matter how politely presented, and the guy refused point blank to believe that he could possibly wrong and said that he was too busy to argue the matter. Too busy badly proofreading texts in-between spouting nonsense on internet forums, no doubt.

These days there is an even better way of finding out how popular certain words and phrases are. Enter a word/phrase into Google’s Ngram Viewer and it searches its repository of over a million or so books and produces a nice graph of how often a word has been used in various books throughout the ages. You can even select which type of books you are searching from; “British English”, “American English”, “Fiction” etc. Fascinating stuff. For example, you can see that gaiety is steadily falling into disuse whereas facebook was non-existent before 1982.

We have online spell-checking these days and you can see errors underlined in red as you type. What you might not see underlined in red are the words that went astray when you rephrased your sentences. Reading your text out loud is a great way of finding errors. After you’ve finished reading it out loud pass it to a friend or colleague and get them to read it out loud too. Even then a few mistakes might slip through.

Remember to give criticism politely and accept it graciously. Acknowledge that there will always be people better educated than you (this might not apply to you Nobel Prize winners out there if you’re reading this). Also remember that just because something is in popular usage doesn’t mean it’s correct. Having said all that, hopefully there aren’t too many mistakes lurking in the articles I’ve written and if there are then I’m all too happy to have them pointed out to me. Now, I shall sit back and wait for the stream of emails to arrive...