Can you spot what’s wrong in the image below? Please post your answer as a comment. I had to read this a couple times before I spotted the reason why I selected this item for Mistake Monday.
I post these challenges to raise awareness of the importance of proofreading.
Read critically, or write badly
Hmm. I’m a heavy punctuator, so I would put a comma after “Unfortunately.”
You also mixed passive voice in the first clause with active voice in the second; I would have said, “Unfortunately, there is no way you can prevent …” or even “Unfortunately, you can’t prevent …” for stronger parallelism between clauses.
Finally, I always prefer “but” over “however” in constructions like this to improve readability, saving “however” for phrases like “however you look at it, …” So I would replace “organization; however, you …” with “organization, but….”
Garrison,
Thanks! I like your edits.
There is another outright punctuation mistake that is hard to notice. I actually had to check my notes to remind myself of what had drawn me to screenshot this text.
“Data hygiene” should be in single quotes, not double quotes.
Theresa,
Thank you! That’s the mistake that I was targeting because there’s no possible way to justify this use of double quotes inside double quotes. On the other hand, I’m sure I’ve made this mistake myself as I went through multiple rounds of edits and tinkering with wording.
Susan
Duh!
Garrison,
You should have seen me wracking my brain this morning as to why I had put this item into the Mistake Monday rotation. I didn’t see it this morning, even though it had somehow caught my eye months ago.