Definitely, is on my list. 

I’ve talked before about the importance of having an in-house style guide, a document, however short, that lists your stylistic preferences in writing. While you might prefer CMOS over AP, there are still plenty of gaps for your industry and writing preferences that you need to list out, such as your use of abbreviations, how you write time, whether you prefer to skip numbers at the beginning of a sentence, even aversions to particular words. 

Your style guide is a jumping off place to create an editing and proofreading checklist. This checklist should include all of the steps you take when finalizing a writing for publication. Steps like check all links and delete double spaces. My checklist also includes a list of common grammar mistakes and misspellings. By the way, this can be another great use for find and replace, but only if you know what you’re looking for. 

This takes a level of awareness and understanding about your own writing style. Know thyself and the peculiarities that make editing your writing unique. Do you love a capital letter? Have a habit of misspelling names? Maybe you let Google Docs autocorrect your speaker attributions in dialogue scenes. Whatever the common mistakes that you make over and over again, finding and correcting them should be a step in your checklist. 

Here are some of the other parts of my checklist:

1. Check for numbers and numerals (I love to spell out all numbers, no matter how high)
2. Imperial units (or metric, consistency and reader comprehension are key)
3. Look for British spellings (theatre, anyone?)
4. -ward not -wards
5. Check dashes (my new favorite punctuation is the em dash)

I don’t usually mistake your for you’re, but often replace its with it’s, so I’m sure to double check that all apostrophes are necessary. It’s the seemingly tiny mistakes that can make a perceptible difference in how your audience receives your message. They might not even know why something was off-putting to them, especially when you consider how flexible is the human brain that it can autocorrect minor mistakes for you. But how great it would be if they can receive the message without the extra brain work. 

Here are some common typos that will probably skate right through spellcheck, do any of these ring true for you?

• for/fro
• then/than
• our/or
• chose/choose 
• to/too
• lose/loose
• led/lead

Sometimes it isn’t that you don’t know the right word, it’s that typing can be tough for even those of us who spend hours a day at a keyboard, and typos happen to everyone. But a good start to eliminating those mistakes is knowing the ones most common to your writing and making sure you check them off the list before hitting submit.

Definitely.