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One of the easiest ways to look stupid on your blog, even if you have the most brilliant ideas ever, is to have spelling and grammar mistakes. We’ve all done it occasionally. The sentence that you thought made sense at 3am, or the word that both you and spell check missed. But if you’ve got habitual spelling and grammar mistakes on your site, it can affect the way people perceive you, and may keep them from treating you like an authority within your niche.

Now, I’m not saying that everything has to be perfect, or that you need to adhere to all the rules of grammar. It doesn’t really matter if you prefer to write ‘2’ rather than spell out ‘two’, no matter what the AP Style Guide says. As well, there are certain grammar rules that we all learned in school that you can disregard. I start sentences with ‘and’ and ‘because’ and use sentence fragments and ‘y’all’ and other colloquialisms, because I’m writing in a conversational tone, and I want it to sound like it would if I were talking.

But there are certain things you need to do, like make sure that you’re using the right word. Know the difference between then/than and affect/effect, not to mention their/there/they’re and your/you’re. If you’re not sure, check. In fact, it would be worthwhile to take a primer on the basic grammar laws – there are lots of resources out there, so you have no excuse.

And that’s what it really comes down to for a lot of us. We’re lazy. We either don’t bother proofreading at all, or we do it so quickly that it’s no surprise that mistakes make it through and get published on our sites.

Here are some guidelines to follow when proofreading to make sure you don’t look like an idiot:

Check your post the way your audience will be viewing it.
With web content, that means viewing it inside a browser. With blog posts especially, it means previewing it before publishing it. This can show you if your text is too dense, or the font is too small.

But don’t forget good old-fashioned paper, either.
There really is no substitute for printing out a hard copy and going over it with a pen. You can find a lot of mistakes this way that you probably missed when viewing it on your screen.

Read it out loud.
You might want to wait until you’re alone, but this is a really useful tool for finding those pesky typing mistakes where you thought you typed ‘through’ and you really typed ‘thought’. It won’t make sense when you read it out loud.

Read it backwards.
This is an old copy-editor trick. By going through something backwards, you’re forced to concentrate on the individual words, instead of the phrases and the meanings behind them. A lot of mistakes make it through because, when we read, we recognize the word that’s supposed to be there instead of the one that actually is.

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