Our Top-Ten Tips For Proofreading Your Annual Report And Proxy Materials… Plus Five New Tips For Today’s Web-Based Environment

Wow, we noticed… it’s been 10 years since we listed our top-ten proofreading tips… tips which several readers told us they had tacked to their walls.

And this year, with the mandatory requirement to post all such materials on the WEB, we realized that not just a new set of proofreading steps is needed, but a somewhat different level of diligence altogether, so we’ve added a few tips for proofreading web docs. Here are the lists:

1. Never rely on the same people who helped to draft, type and revise the material to do the final proofreading. Two inherent flaws of human nature to remember: We’re always blind to our own faults…and doubly-alert to those of others.
2. Never proofread from a fax. Lower-case “c”s and “e”s, and “i”s and “l”s for example, can be virtually indistinguishable, and your eyes will always fool you into thinking all’s OK.
3. Always double-check the proper spelling of every proper name – and especially the ones you think you know by heart. One little mistake can mean doing the job all over again, which can easily be a six-figure blooper these days.
4. Always have someone call every telephone number that appears in your AR: the transfer agent, IR department, consumer hotline, etc. Wrong numbers can make a lot of very important people very angry with you…for a very long time.
5. Never let spell-check lull you into complacency: it wouldn’t, for example, have helped our late alma pater, Manny Hanny, avoid one of the most famous Annual Report Bloopers of all times; a reference to our “certified pubic accountants”.
6. Always use shared software to share drafts of your documents across ALL the many internal and external drafting and reviewing teams…and make sure that everyone is using the same version of the software.
7. Always designate only one “captain” with the authority – and the ability to authorize and make changes in the final document, to assure that all ‘edits’ are agreed upon, and actually made. (Pray it ain’t you).
8. Always allow time to let the material “get cold” for a few days, before you read it one last time. (We are very sorry to say that we ourselves have instantly spotted an error in every issue of the Optimizer we’ve put out to date…one that jumps right off the page at us…when we got our copy in the mail).
9. Try proofreading backwards, or without regard to what you’re actually reading – looking, not ‘scanning’ for spelling errors and for commonly mistyped homonyms, like their and there, common mix-ups like lose and loose (two we always seem to miss, as several readers have reminded) and for mixed-up plurals and possessives.
10. Above all, always take your time!