Brewing, Baking, and Blogging: The Importance of Proofing

When baking yeast breads or brewing beer, one of the most important steps in the process is "proofing."

According to Wikipedia, "Proofing (also called proving) is a step in creating yeast breads and baked goods where the yeast is allowed to leaven the dough. This step is not often explicitly named, and normally shows up in recipes as ‘Allow dough to rise’."¹ Failure to observe this step will lead to a very, very dense product.²

In brewing, "proofing" is the step of adding yeast to warm water (95°-100°F) and letting it sit for a few minutes, before "pitching" (adding) it to the wort, or unfermented beer. Improper proofing will lead to poor fermentation, and a flat beer, at best (which is still pretty bad).³

Likewise, skimping on the proofing (or proof-reading) step of blogging can lead to equally unintended results. Before you hit the "publish" button on your blog article, be sure you’ve taken a few quick and simple steps to ensure in addition to imparting good, solid information to your readers, your grammar, punctuation, spelling and general syntax are what you truly want your readers to see.

Following are some items I’ve taken from real blogs (many of them by professional bloggers) over the past few weeks. I’m not linking the sources because my intent is not to point fingers, call out anyone, or embarrass anyone. However, I hope some of these gaffes will energize you to take a few extra moments to ensure they don’t show up in your articles.

Proofreading

Read your "final draft" aloud, and listen to what you’re reading. (Better yet, have someone else proofread for you, or listen to you read. Not always practical, but if you can get help like that, use it!) This might have prevented the following:

both apps can:

• Both can post text and images together
• Both are compatible with WordPress.com and WordPress.org (aka self hosted WordPress)
• Both can add categories to posts (and recognize current ones)
• Both can delete previous posts

In each of the preceding bullets, the words both can are redundant, and detract from the presentation. By simply eliminating those words from each bullet would have improved the flow.

Redundancy is often the sign of rushing: The author is editing "in her head" as she writes, and both the original thought and the revision get typed. As a result, you see something like this:

My original plan originally was to…

Spell-checking

Spell-checking is both the simplest proofing task, and the one most fraught with potholes. First, there is no excuse for misspelling a word like professional. On my computer, it’s underlined with a squiggly red line, and bolded (and may well be on yours, too):

There are spell-check plugins available for WordPress, or you can use a text editor (for example, MS Word or Live Writer) with built-in spell-check. Firefox has a built-in spell-checker. There’s really no excuse for true misspellings to occur, yet they do.⁴

A couple examples (if you figuratively hear the sound of fingernails screeching on a chalkboard, I apologize in advance):

"Everything came to a hault." What?

You speak, but you do not give a speach. I see that a lot.

Possessives and Plurals

Possessives seem to be a huge bugaboo for many people; I think it all stems from the confusion between its (possessive) and it’s (the contracted form of it is). It is a pronoun: Possessive pronouns do not have an apostrophe: His, hers, its, ours, theirs.

Likewise, plural nouns do not have an apostrophe: Trains, planes, trucks, cars. On the other hand, possessive nouns do require an apostrophe: "The train’s caboose." "The plane’s wing." But not "The plane’s winged home." And for heaven’s sake, don’t ever use an apostrophe in a verb: "The plane leave’s in an hour." Yes, sadly, I’ve seen that usage, and not just once.

Use the Right Word(s)

This goes hand-in-hand with spell-checking. Simply because a word is spelled correctly doesn’t mean it’s used correctly. (And in case you’re wondering, it’s and you’re are the correct spellings in the context of this paragraph.)

Sadly, too many people really don’t know the correct words. For example, "I would of used hot water if I had any." Of course, the proper form is would have used, the past-perfect tense. Would of comes from the contracted form, would’ve. Sounds right, but isn’t, when written.

Other common misuses include their/there/they’re (usually just the first two forms get confused); your/you’re; and as noted above, its/it’s. One would think, as often as we see the confusion between "their" and "there," people would be more attuned to using the right form. One would be wrong.

Another common mistake is to interchange affect and effect. Most of the time, "affect" is a verb, and "effect" isn’t. Even when "effect" is a verb, it’s a transitive verb (meaning "a" does something to "b").

Among World of Warcraft bloggers (of whom I am one, of course) we see the common misuse of ad and add. The former is the shortened form of "advertisement" while the latter is gamer jargon for "more bad guys": "additional monsters."

Finally (I could go on a lot longer, but I’m sure neither you nor I would benefit), one that makes me grind my teeth in frustration: peek, peak, and pique.

I took a peek inside. After I peeked, my interest was piqued.

The noise reached its peak. Shortly after it peaked, it subsided.

The title of this article was enough to pique your interest. I seriously doubt it peaked your interest, though.

"Peek" is a quick look, or the act of taking a quick look. "Peak" means top, summit or apex. And "pique" as a verb means to excite or arouse. ("Pique" is also a noun, but most definitely not a synonym for peek or peak!)

Proofing: It’s more than yeast.

I know I’ve trotted out the same examples you’ve seen time and again in discussions of grammar, spelling, and proper usage. The reason is because we (and yes, I include myself!) keep making the same mistakes, time and again. I also know most of us know better, most of the time. Rarely do we make these mistakes out of ignorance ("would of" might be an exception ).

Rather, as I pointed out earlier, we get in a rush. "Finally, this article over which I’ve slaved for hours/days/weeks, is DONE!" Click "Publish." Just because you’re through writing, don’t think you’re through preparing your article for publication.

Proof it, spell-check it, and proofread it again. Just as I’m going to do, write now.⁵