August 21, 2007
‘My young staff members make sloppy mistakes’
I run my own award-winning communications business. I have eight staff in their 20s, all of whom are generally great, enthusiastic, creative, hard working and problem solving, but …
…they do not get simple things right first time. The reports and proposals that they prepare for clients inevitably contain typos, grammatical and spelling mistakes and often get the numbers wrong too. The result is that I have to check everything myself before it is sent out.
I have tried many things: training, coaching, sending offending documents back repeatedly, minor bollocking. Should I be tougher, humiliate them? In such a small team I worry this will be de-motivating. I have tried encouraging them to send things out unchecked by me, in the hope that the responsibility will motivate them to be more professional. This hasn’t worked yet. And of course this is a vicious circle. The more I correct, the more they unwittingly "leave" things for me to correct, knowing that I am compelled to ensure that our work goes out looking professional and right.
Should I employ a typist? Should I threaten to withhold their bonuses if they don’t get the basics right?
A couple of options to start with:
1) Hire a quality control person to proof-read for you
2) Get the young ‘uns to peer review before showing to you
Posted by: TK, banker, male, 34 | August 21st, 2007 at 3:23 pm | Report this commentask them to fact ckeck and spell check
Posted by: tw | August 21st, 2007 at 3:49 pm | Report this commentPeer review can be a really good way of eliminating these problems. Although many are unable to spot mistakes in their own work, many are wel able to pick them up in someone else. Having a quality assurance system like this in place can help reduce the problem.
Posted by: Katie | August 21st, 2007 at 3:54 pm | Report this commentOf course the fact that most people in their mid twenties will never have been taught basic grammar at school does not help!
You don’t know what to do with them, sloppy mistakes and all? Tell us you are joking. You do understand that your staff are a reflection of your ability to hire and manage properly…
I am 26, and while finishing graduate studies simultaneously worked for an organization that flew me around the world for various meetings with partners, led teleconferences in different time zones, thus preparation was done at all hours (ie: on little sleep). Not once did a supervisor tell me that I had sloppy mistakes. They simply gave me more responsibilities.
Your staff do not take you, your company, or the work program seriously if repeated mistakes occur. They are laughing all the way to happy hour (no doubt which they often have time to attend- why should they stay and work, you already have it covered…) singing joyfully that they have the “best boss and best job ever”.
Possible options:
A) If you have company resources to spare, perhaps announce to staff that there will be a formal review session by an outside consultant who will come in and examine which staff need extra help- call it “team building” and move on with it accordingly.
B) Catch any twentysomething’s attention- offer a reward for the best work over the next 2 months. Announce that the best performers will get any of the following which you decide upon (a nice bonus, get to travel with you 1st/biz class on next client meeting, etc). The other lazy staff will surely follow in the direction of the most-improved if you do this every several months.
C)If all else fails, fire them in 6 months. There are too many twenty-somethings from top schools who will work hard, and not make any “sloppy mistakes”…
Posted by: CO | August 21st, 2007 at 5:52 pm | Report this commentWhy not start a ‘First Time Right’ campaign? It encourages individual responsibility, reduces tedious proof-reading - and saves trees! You could also try leaving a few copies of ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves’ lying around the office.
FC, consultant, female, 49
Posted by: Fiona Crisp | August 21st, 2007 at 6:02 pm | Report this commentWhy not take a leaf out of David Mamet’s play/film, Glengarry Glen Ross? Announce a contest for the month to see who makes fewest mistakes. First prize? A cadillac. Second prize? Set of steak knives. Third prize - you’re fired.
That should get their attention.
Posted by: Blake | August 21st, 2007 at 6:10 pm | Report this commentPeer review is good, combined with some accountability, for example:
* each document goes out with the name of both the writer and the reviewer on it
* you do occasional quality spot checks, and if you find mistakes it’s the reviewer who gets a bollocking
* KPIs - measure the number of mistakes in the original and the number of mistakes after reviewing. KPIs tend to work best when you have enough data to measure - how many of these documents are going out?
If anyone tells you they weren’t taught grammar at school, that’s a feeble excuse. It probably isn’t true, and anyway - they work in a communications business, it’s their job to know how to spell and write. If they haven’t made and won’t make the effort to acquire the required knowledge for the job, they should leave. Of course it’s also your mistake for hiring them, but you don’t need to perpetuate it. If they admit the problem and request help, good for them - there are plenty of books on the topic which you can buy for the price of five minutes of your time.
Posted by: Leigh Caldwell - chief executive, 31, male | August 21st, 2007 at 8:53 pm | Report this commentI think often that intelligent, young people get bored by finalizing something, and think they’ve already done all the “important” difficult work. The last mile is always the hardest.
If correctness is as valuable in your company as you indicate, then it’s important to make this a serious issue and convince your employees of this individually and as a group.
If you find a single mistake, don’t waste your time with it, send the rubbish back and ask them if they proof-read it and had someone else give a peer review.
If they continue to make mistakes, have a talk with them individually. Explain to them why it’s so important that correctness is used.
If they still continue to make mistakes, it’s a sign of a different issue, either they are not listening to you, or they lack the skills required and need training.
It might be that the first step is all that’s required, just convincing each employee that this is extremely important. Believe it or not, they may not even realize it. We are so accustomed trying to understand and process complex information, that the simplest of concepts are passed over. Possibly an anecdote about how a mistake caused you to lose a contract or lawsuit or something would be helpful.
Posted by: Steven Alyari | August 21st, 2007 at 8:54 pm | Report this commentGet them to read their work out loud.
One colleague was amazed at what she had written and how she had written it, when forced to actually look at it and read it out loud.
A press office I know writes their press releases very carelessly and without checking their output. I once gave some of their work to a senior VP and asked him whether the CEO had or could have really said the poorly-written and far too long sentences he was reported to have said. The VP began reading under his breath, but I insisted that he read this out loud - he ran out of breath well before he could get to the end of the sentence…
Posted by: Bruno | August 21st, 2007 at 9:10 pm | Report this commentI ran a Grammar Competition - bottle of champagne to the most striking example of poor grammar submitted. It’s not hard to find examples where the grammar is not just ambiguous but impenetrable.
I also wrote a few pages summing up the grammar I was taught at school fifty years ago, and occasionally showed these to people who needed it until I discovered the Ottawa University website.
It is not a simple issue.
Posted by: Tim Ward | August 21st, 2007 at 11:44 pm | Report this commentDo you realise that your employees don’t care a thing about the mistakes in the proposal/reports because there is no consequence for their mistakes? After all, it is NOT their company and they DON’T bear any cost resulting from the mistakes. It is a very common phenomenon – people are just acting selfish. Let me assure you, if today they are running their company and it is their own money that is at stake, they will all become super-editors who proof-read a thousand times before sending out any document.
So what can you do about it? Easy - just make them bear the consequence of their own mistakes. For a person as smart as you are I think that’s all I need to say. If I were you, I would simply tell my employees that from now on for every mistake I found in their works I will deduct $10 from their pay (of course I would firstly ensure that this is legal). You will be surprised by how fast people change their attitude once they know their money is at stake.
Posted by: Joyce | August 22nd, 2007 at 12:21 am | Report this commentI work for a consulting firm where we hire a lot of young people straight out of college (I’m one of them). What’s worked well for us is a combination of patience, feedback, and formal processes.
The main thing to understand is that they are not delivering poor quality work because they are lazy, or uninspired, or unenthusiastic, etc. It’s just one of those things that comes with time, experience, and practice.
Berating them or setting up contests is unlikely to solve the problem because they are certainly already aware of the problem, and motivated to solve it. I know I’ve felt the knot in my stomach when I found out that something I had sent contained errors. That’s plenty of motivation to get things right. The question to be addressed is how to guide them to establish good work habits.
The answer is that you have to put them in situations where they are actively reviewing work, doing corrections, and thinking critically about how to go about assuring quality.
Grammatical errors are difficult because either you check them or you don’t. The key is to make sure that THEY are doing the correcting, not you. They should be thinking about why one way is right and another is wrong. Give them notes on their work, explain why what they did was incorrect, and be patient.
For numerical errors there is a better solution - along with each document they deliver there should be a “prove to me that it’s right” document that lays out how they checked the numbers. Making quality control a formal part of the expectations helps ensure that they are going back and checking things. It also gives them the foundation to start asking the question, “how do I make sure that this is right?”
Anyway, since I’m only 26 I hope this is not too full of errors… Perhaps you can review it and send it back to me?
Posted by: Martin | August 22nd, 2007 at 12:39 am | Report this commentMy gut response to this situation is that we are looking at symptoms rather than causes. I don’t know the full situation, but I would guess two things: a) you/your company place a large emphasis on the “personableness” of the people who work there; and b) you overtly avoid hiring anyone who does not demonstrate that personableness, no matter how good their other qualifications may be.
My guess is that this has created something of an unbalanced team; by that, I mean a team that does not really reflect the requirements of the work at hand. From your description, it has reached such a stage that you need to hire a “corrective” person. This would be someone who is not quite so personable, but very reflective and considered. It’s amazing what a simple, genuine smile from such a person at another’s really silly mistake can do in a meeting. This doesn’t have to be a “sardonic monster”, but just someone with a nice liking for language, and a sense of connection with more indirect communication.
You have good impluses as a manager, if I may say so. I can tell from your note that you sense you have yourself done something wrong, and that you are eager to correct it. Workplaces/teams really do need this mix of dark and light personalities. Anything else will be unbalanced. (I think!)
I think this also accounts for some of the more dire responses to your question. In their own way they may be trying to balance this unbalanced situation.
Posted by: Scott | August 22nd, 2007 at 1:36 am | Report this commentHire a proof-reader… or start acting like one.
Posted by: G Salcido | August 22nd, 2007 at 6:14 am | Report this commentYou’ll need one anyhow.
This “proof-reading” could be completed by an administrative assistant. Hire a detail oriented, obsessive-compulsive grammar expert to replace a team member. Making an example of a staff member by replacing them with an assistant could make a point to your team. Hold the assistant accountable for the accuracy of the work.
You should end up with both a lower staff budget and a more efficient output of information. - As well as the time for you to get things done.
Posted by: Matt | August 22nd, 2007 at 6:37 am | Report this commentYou run a communications company but didn’t check that your employees could spell before hiring them?
Posted by: Amanda | August 22nd, 2007 at 9:42 am | Report this commentPoint out to them that they may be sued for misrepresentation if they don’t check their facts. They really need to be aware, though, that losing the job is a realistic outcome if they don’t shape up. Not ALL twentysomethings are illiterate, and you’re bound to be able to replace your team.
The inefficiency and potential damage of literacy mistakes by your staff are obvious but the inefficiency of poor keyboard skills and numerous on-screen drafts before they think that a document is right, is less obvious. Eight staff is probably above the critical mass at which competent secretarial assistance would be efficient. There shouldn’t be any difficulty in decreeing that all outgoing customer correspondence is final printed by a secretarial assistant. It might also be useful to get the secretarial assistant to file hard copies of correspondence, unless of course, your eight staff might not be exceptionally literate or numerate but they are damn good at filing.
Getting the numbers wrong is sloppy. You can probably define those types of communication that might contain critical numbers and insist that final hard copy is signed off by you or by someone that you can trust to get the numbers right. If wrong numbers are picked up, react strongly and explain that it is unacceptable to find such mistakes at final signing.
Posted by: Ironybrew: 57, male, retired. | August 22nd, 2007 at 12:48 pm | Report this commentI suspect you hired these young workers because, all things considered, they were the best that you could get. I don’t work in the “communications business” myself but I suspect most young people attracted to this work come to it via their enthusiasm for technology and the “bright lights” of media work. Almost by definition, they are unlikely to be the kind of people who show a lot of attention to detail, and - big generalisation here - despite their intelligence and creativity they are probably not highly literate either. A failure to get simple things right and to present one’s work properly renders it valueless. Literally. Because people like me - clients like me - will just throw it away. There is too much material flowing across my desk every day to bother with badly written bumpf.
What can you do? I suggest a two-pronged approach. Yes, continue to coach and guide them, try to inculcate the fundamental need to take a professional attitude to their work. Do all that. But hire someone specifically for their literacy as well. Intangible though it is, it is a real skill. You don’t need anyone else who is creative, who is enthusiastic, who thinks that success begins and ends with an idea. Hire, say, a History or English Lit graduate who is trying to break into the communications industry, but who doesn’t have any direct experience or qualifications for it (such people are hardly scarce). I wouldn’t hire a typist if I were you, you need someone with good quality editorial skills.
Posted by: David | August 22nd, 2007 at 1:24 pm | Report this commentIt’s your own fault for hiring functional illiterates in the first place. Discipline yourself first by requiring that any new hires pass an applied English writing and sums test. Second, put a new item in the company policy document that prior to an annual performance review current staff must pass the same tests.
Posted by: G Josef T | August 22nd, 2007 at 3:25 pm | Report this commentTry taking a look at www.basicwritingskills.co.uk you can currently purchase an interactive CD to help with Basic Writing, we have been told they will soon be releasing a server based product so all staff can have access as and when. The program will also have a reporting tool to help you monitor their progress.
Posted by: S R Wright | August 22nd, 2007 at 10:05 pm | Report this commentTry this : sack the majority of your staff starting with the juniors; outsource the bulk of your report writing and presentations to a KPO in India (many investment banks do preceisely this). You will have lower costs and your clients will have better quality reports. And use the time and money saved to grow your business.
Posted by: Out of the box | August 23rd, 2007 at 6:30 am | Report this commentJudging by some of the posts on this thread, the problem with poor grammar and spelling is not confined to your young staff. It’s endemic to the modern world and exacerbated by the proliferation of email communication and management-speak.
Posted by: Female, 25, PR | August 23rd, 2007 at 9:35 am | Report this commentYou run your own company. Defacto - the standards and values which characterise the output of the people you employ are a reflection of those standards and values that matter to you. Your text implies that deep down you know that the standard of work they are delivering is simply not good enough and that so far you have failed to tackle the problem with sufficient vigour and moral courage. I wonder if there is a hint of confrontation avoidance in the way that you manage your people.
Accept without casuistry that you have a responsibility to ensure that your staff understand that their work is to be delivered in the spirit of the pursuit of excellence. Their standards should be your standards. A willingness to settle for anything less is beneath that which you and your company embody. Repeated failure to clear the bar brings consequence, particularly where this results from unwillingness or a lack of effort to improve - limited career prospects, smaller bonuses, additional training, whatever you chose. Incentivise them to get it right. You don’t need to be a despot, but you will need to firm, unwavering.
Will there be confrontation, some disruption to creativty in your award winning company? Almost certainly in the short term, but the long term benefits are obvious. Will you lose someone - quite possibly, but if they are not willing to embrace the change you so obviously need, is that such a loss?
As for the methods, you have ample choice from the various postings here. Do you need secretarial support? Perhaps, but that is a different issue from the one of engendering greater responsibility and commitment in your current employees. Provide some leadership, some moral fortitude, an absolute determination to make it so.
Posted by: hyperion41 | August 23rd, 2007 at 5:28 pm | Report this commentIn practical terms how can one explain what might be wrong with:
“but you will need to firm, unwavering”.
Where does one start?
Posted by: Anon of Pedantry | August 24th, 2007 at 1:04 am | Report this commentAre you giving your subordinates enough responsibility? Do they get credit for the work they do? Try asking them to do an entire task to themselves, and get rid of those who fail twice (once is OK).
Posted by: I've been there | August 24th, 2007 at 1:12 am | Report this commentIf the people you hired are good-quality graduates from good universities then they should have excellent editorial skills already, based on years of writing essays and reading. If not, then clearly you have failed to quality-control your candidates i.e. checked up on their references and qualifications and seen samples of their work before hiring them. Maybe you hired them for their energetic enthusiasm: if so, then why are you complaining about their lack of attention to detail? It is rare that these two character traits occur in the one person.
It’s hard to judge whether or not you should let the sloppier staff members go. Presumably they must have some redeeming features or you wouldn’t have put up with their cavalier approach to editing up to now. All I can say is that any communications professional, whatever their age, should never dream of sending important work out with basic spelling and grammar mistakes. There are plenty of 20-somethings out there with higher standards so don’t hang on to your mediocre staff for fear of not being able to replace them.
Posted by: MB | August 24th, 2007 at 4:21 pm | Report this commentAnd next time around, check the qualifications and skills of new candidates thoroughly, asking for work samples if possible. One tip: foreign language graduates usually have good editorial skills due to the attention to detail that language degrees require.
In your sentence “…they do not get simple things right first time.”?
Did you forget “the” between “right” and “first time”?
Not bashing you for it, just a bit funny considering the topic of your post!
Great blog post though; spurs some great discussion.
Posted by: turtle | August 27th, 2007 at 3:02 pm | Report this commentThis may not address the habits of your current employees, but I would consider giving a proofreading test to future job candidates at your firm (just the serious finalists, though, because this takes your time and theirs). When I worked in publishing this was a standard practice that also sent a clear message: namely, that proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar were an important part of every job at the company.
Posted by: betty | August 29th, 2007 at 10:41 pm | Report this commentHiring typists and proofreaders without doing anything else is akin to–pardon the need for ruthlessly crass analogy–hiring a toilet-sanitation crew at the end of each working day without resolving the problem of people not bothering to flush in the first place.
Attention to grammar and concern for data accuracy
1 need to be requirements for hiring, and
2 need to be further instilled on a daily basis
–not suddenly demanded only when matters get out of hand. Your employees fail to understand this because you yourself failed from day one–they have hitherto, perhaps unintentionally, been made to feel ‘it is no big deal’.
Incentives and disincentives (bonuses and dismissals) are useless without
1 a no-holds-barred heart-to-heart brainstorming,
2 company-supplied reference books,
3 a weeks-long retraining programme, and
4 actual dismissal for those who still fail
–in that order.
If you long for an easier ’solution’, then don’t be surprised if the young ones remain nonchalant.
Posted by: Michael, private banker, 38 | August 30th, 2007 at 12:47 am | Report this commentI train new staff at our company. If they make regular serious mistakes then it is likely, eventually, that some of our customers will die.
Of course we are well regulated to ensure that such mistakes don’t happen, and I am responsible for implementing this.
The first stage is to select the right staff. We test them initially at interview, then in a brief initial trainning. Assuming they pass this then they are trained by me or other experienced front-line staff until they have shown consistency. At the moment I check each one at the end of the training, although when I have staff experienced enough I will be able to delegate that.
Employees only deal with customers on their own when I see that they are ready, and have the skill, professionalism and attention to detail that is needed for the job. Then they are tested at least 3 times a year, to ensure that their standards have not dropped.
Until employees are trained they earn very little (most in our sector would not be paid at all, but my company is more compassionate) because they are not productive, have to have their work watched by a senior employee. So perhaps stop paying them for the time that you are using to monitor their work. It would be hard to implement for existing employees, but for the future you could have a training period where you check all their work. When you are satisfied that they don’t need monitoring then start paying a full salary.
Posted by: Richard | September 1st, 2007 at 2:12 am | Report this commentP.S. It works. We don’t kill customers or staff, and nor do our competitors. In the section of our industry that operates legally the rate of errors serious enough to be noticed (and errors are very easily spotted, at best in terse comments or dry reports, at worst in the morning papers) is tiny.
P.P.S. Yes I get the irony of my double tap of the “n” in training on my previous post. My job does not entail much typing!
Posted by: Richard | September 1st, 2007 at 2:22 am | Report this commentPerhaps something as simple as a written warning might be enough to make the sloppier members of staff take the issue seriously? Of course, you would have to make sure it was flawlessly worded.
Posted by: Nicola | September 4th, 2007 at 5:15 pm | Report this commentSentence length.
Is. Sometimes.
A problem.
As a 30-something copywriter with experience in both radio and print media, here be my tuppence worth…
• Make them write in MS Word and use the spell-check function, (which they can access by simply pressing ‘f7’ on the keyboard.)
• Make them consult a style guide. Direct them to Fowler’s, or the Economist, which is especially good for business-orientated writing.
• Make them read it out loud. Ninety word sentences lack clarity, and we all need to breathe. And, as Fowler said, a paragraph is a unit of thought, not of length.
• Acquaint them with Fowler’s, Roget’s Thesaurus, The OED – put a copy on every desk.
• Consider adopting a ‘house style’.
• Avoid writing in the ‘passive’ voice. (IE: “A hit B” is much more direct than “B was hit by A”.)
• Avoid weasel-word phrasing.
• Make evidence of good, clear writing a workplace requirement, part of the job description and annual appraisal process.
Finally, here are some thoughts from greater minds than mine that seem to relate to your predicament…
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” – Samuel Johnson
“As a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written: you have no idea what vigour it will give to your style.” – Sydney Smith
“Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.” – Thomas Carlyle
“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” – Henry Ford
“The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out” – Voltaire
Posted by: Craigoh | September 4th, 2007 at 5:24 pm | Report this commentImagine what it feels like to work in a law firm where each year’s stream of 20-something new recruits seems to have the same problems. How do we cure it? We give them responsibility; more responsibility and yet more. They get to manage others (and their typos) and believe it or not the mistakes usually get caught, although they, like us, share the embarrassment if the odd mistake gets through. Humiliation doesn’t work; embarrassing yourself in front of your team, or your client, does. The worst offenders generally improve; hard cases have their work product returned unread and asked to do a cold read before resubmitting. Eventually, after 4-5 years, it becomes second nature to get it right and to check.
Posted by: Kate | September 5th, 2007 at 8:19 am | Report this commentAsk yourself, why are you hiring these people, what criteria are you using to hire them. They may not be good at detail, grammer but they must have other abilities in order for you to have hired them in the first place.
Start to employ people with different skill sets so that there is a complimentary skill set within the group. Hire a few mature people, even on a part time basis who are retired/part time English teachers and offer classes on grammer and English after work, as part of the on-going training. If people have to stay after work to learn a subject they will learn quickly.
Posted by: Frank Khan | September 5th, 2007 at 3:17 pm | Report this commentIt is not only young people that have problems of literacy. If you spend most of your working life able to use competent secretarial assistance for important communication, you don’t automatically learn from the nuanced changes in the finished product. When you no longer have secretarial assistance, you tend to find that your poor literacy has been masked (albeit efficiently) rather than cured. I am personally grateful to Craigoh (above) for suggesting Fowler’s and The Economist’s style guides. I had never heard of them but I will get copies next week. One further suggestion could be to use the thesaurus function in MS Word, which can be a convenient means of checking the nuance of or alternatives to vocabulary and seems to be useful for people writing in a second language.
Posted by: Ironybrew. 57, retired, male | September 8th, 2007 at 12:16 pm | Report this commentI’m impressed - though not convinced - at how opimistic these replies are.
Posted by: lucy kellaway | September 10th, 2007 at 12:13 pm | Report this commentI consider myself one of the world’s leading experts in sloppiness and inacuracy. I was badly educated and have difficulties with spelling and with typing. Everything I write is riddled with careless, dumb slips. I know I make these mistakes so I always read things over several times…but still the mistakes escape undetected. It isn’t that I don’t mind: I do. It is embarrassing to make one’s living as a writer and to be so at sea with the basics.
My children seem to be as bad as me, or worse. Shouting at them doesn’t help. Getting them to read their homework out loud helps a bit, but even then they read out what they think they have written, ignoring the fact that what they have actually written is a dog’s dinner.
For me, thank goodness, there is an answer. They are called sub editors and they go through everything I have written with a fine tooth comb before it goes into the newspaper. They rescue me from humiliation on an almost daily basis. You should go for the same solution and employ a proof reader - though you should also continue to give your staff bollockings for sloppiness. This in itself won’t make them abandon a lifetime of carelessness. But it will at least drive the message home that sloppiness is something to be ashamed of.
So that’s the literacy dealt with but there’s still going to be a problem with numeracy (a word apparently outside MS’s skill-set because it can’t incorporate a “z”). For regular calculations spreadsheets can help. If the calculations you want your employees to make are routine, then it is simple to make “locked” spreadsheets available in MS or Linux and require a print of the “workings” to accompany a final draft of the letter before signing. If mistakes are still picked up at signing, they will either be due to near inexcusable sloppiness or to mathematical nuances that need to be explained.
Posted by: Ironybrew. 57, retired, male | September 11th, 2007 at 1:02 am | Report this commentWhat is the problem?
Posted by: Alice | September 20th, 2007 at 12:28 pm | Report this commentIs there no unemployment in UK?
My boss has asked me to review my documents the next day, it is surprising how many more mistakes you can see in your own work after some time away from it. Also the peer review idea really helps to get every team member focused on quality.
Posted by: Astra | September 26th, 2007 at 2:07 am | Report this commentMy boss has asked me to review my documents the next day, it is surprising how many more mistakes you can see in your own work after some time away from it. Also the peer review idea really helps to get every team member focused on quality.
Posted by: Astra | September 26th, 2007 at 2:08 am | Report this commentMy boss has asked me to review my documents the next day, it is surprising how many more mistakes you can see in your own work after some time away from it. Also the peer review idea really helps to get every team member focused on quality.
Posted by: Astra | September 26th, 2007 at 2:09 am | Report this commentAs a professional writer in an agency environment I can assure you that such mistakes are not restricted to junior members of staff in their 20s! I understand that you have mentioned these failings to your team already, but perhaps now is the time to organise some training to improve their writing skills - something that neither GCSEs, A Levels or degree programs provide their students with, although many employers expect it. Perhaps you could also try setting deadlines for the evening before you actually need the document. Then get them to review their work first thing in the morning. If they can’t identify mistakes, then training is in order. If they can, perhaps it is time for a more serious discussion about their conscientiousness and attention to detail.
Posted by: Sarah | September 26th, 2007 at 10:38 am | Report this commentMy thoughts (as an obsessive speller):
- They should use Word or any equivalent that check grammar and spelling as you go - those red or green lines are very useful.
- Even after that, they should discipline themselves to run a formal/interactive spellcheck and grammar check before submitting anything.
- Be aware of your personal potholes - I have never written a first pass of a document and gotten every “it’s” versus “its” correctly. The solution: before anyone else sees it, I do a check specifically for this problem. At that point it’s easy to correct.
- No matter how obsessive a proofreader you may be, your own work always needs to be quickly proofed by someone else. Always. I do mean always.
I have thought of this as something that needed to happen in the final stages of a document, so as not to be too much of a weight on my coworkers. However, if I had a boss that saw red at the first typo, even in a draft, I would do this step before sending him anything.
As a note, spell- and grammar-check don’t catch everything - if it was obvious, however, that they hadn’t even bothered to run those I would send it back unread and with a comment. It would be gentle the first time or two, increasingly pointed thereafter.
Alec
Posted by: Alec | September 26th, 2007 at 2:10 pm | Report this commentI’ll work for you! I LOVE proof-reading, I am a copy editor and am also in my twenties (albeit late twenties). Gizza job.
Posted by: Pegs | October 10th, 2007 at 4:03 pm | Report this comment