Write Your LifeWritten by David Leonhardt
Take out a white piece of paper and place it on your kitchen table. You now have two choices. You can write or draw on it, or you can leave it there. If you write or draw, you control paper's destiny, words or images it will express, character it will display, very meaning of its existence. If you choose to leave it on your kitchen table, it will remain white. Over time, if left undisturbed, it will slowly turn yellow, old and weary, with no character and no meaning. But wait. It will not be left undisturbed. Surely something will spill on it. If your kitchen table sees kind of abuse ours does, it won't take a day before there's a strawberry stain on it, perhaps a few drops of milk or syrup, or maybe some stray mashed potatoes.
| | Those Telltale TyposWritten by Marcia Yudkin
"To be or to be." That's how one of most famous sentences in English language began several years ago in a new edition of Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Six professional proofreaders failed to catch mistake, which received national publicity and gave publishing company a red face.Similarly, Wall Street Journal once devoted eight column inches to ridiculing a conference on critical thinking that sent out a press release referring to conference's "world renown" researchers "in field of thinking" such as our former surgeon general "C. Everett Coop." (He spells it "Koop.") And more than bad publicity was at stake when L.L. Bean's back-to-school catalog invited people to call a phone number held by a Virginia company instead of Maine-based mega- retailer. L.L. Bean paid Virginia company an unnamed sum of money (surely six figures) to immediately take over that misprinted phone number. The cause: someone in production department who "knew" that a toll-free number starting with "877" should really have started with "800." Typographical errors can have serious repercussions for your organization. Misspellings and grammatical flubs damage your credibility, omitted words cause confusion for customers and numbers that get printed wrongly can prevent buyers from reaching you. Here are some tips for making certain that your materials are letter-perfect. * Let your printouts sit at least overnight before finalizing them. Rereading after even half a day has lapsed helps you spot errors you can't find when you've just typed them in.
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