Proofreading Your Marketing Copy – Consider The Skimmers As Well As The Readers

When you sit down to write a message – whether it’s a letter to a friend, copy for your website, or a letter to send to prospects – you know what you mean to say. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always come out the way you intended.
I experienced an embarrassing example of misunderstood copy this week.
When I write copy for clients I go over it and over it. Whenever possible I also ask someone else to read it just to make sure that my message is clear, that I don’t have any typographical errors, etc. And then, of course, my clients give their input and I make revisions if they want them. So plenty of eyes see the copy before it is presented to my clients’ prospective customers.
Failure to proofread correctly can lead to misunderstandings.
I don’t always have someone available at a moment’s notice. And when I’m writing for my ezines or blog, or for EzineArticles.com, I don’t always go over the copy as many times to make sure everything is right. So this week something slipped by.
I wrote an article about the good and the bad of making fundraising donors mad, and I sent a version of that article to my fundraising ezine subscribers.
An hour after it was published I got an email with the subject line: “Are you crazy? Have you lost it?”
It seems that my reader had come away with the understanding that I wanted her to do the things I had described as ways to drive donors away from your organization for good. My suspicion is that she had skimmed the article rather than reading every word. But that’s no excuse.
If you read that article, you’ll see that had I included sub-heads that made it clear that I was saying “Do this” and “Don’t do this,” she would not have become confused.
Had I sent this to someone else to read they might have picked up on the possibility for confusion and I could have made adjustments before sending the article out into the world. But, if they read every word even a fresh set of eyes might not have spotted a potential problem.
I’m glad the lady wrote me so I could clear up the misunderstanding. But most people won’t write. They’ll just go away.
A better proofreading method…
After this experience, I’m going to be looking for something more when I go back over my copy – both for my clients and for myself. And I’m going to ask my proofreaders to do something a little different. I’m going to ask them to skim the copy before they actually read it.
We all know that subheads and bullets make it easy for skimmers to get the gist of a message without having to take the time to read the whole thing. When writing marketing copy, the hope always is that those “stop signs” will encourage them to go back and read to fill in the blanks. But if their first impression is the wrong one, many will not stay to find out if they really “got the message.”
When the message is important – have someone who doesn’t know what it is “supposed to say” skim it, then read it before you send it out. Then ask them what they understood you to say.
You could save yourself some embarrassment and avoid losing sales over a misunderstanding.