Accuracy in report writing and buisness skills

ACCURACY

Clarity and conciseness are primary objectives of effective technical writing.

However, if your writing is clear and concise but incorrect—grammatically or textually—then you have wasted your time and destroyed your credibility. To be effective, your technical writing must be accurate.

Accuracy in technical writing requires that you proofread your text.

In addition to all the other errors, it should be “Dog and Cat Shop,” of course. The errors make the writer look incompetent.

To ensure accurate writing, use the following proofreading tips:

1. Let someone else read it—We miss errors in our own writing for two reasons. First, we make the error because we don’t know any better.

Second, we read what we think we wrote, not what we actually wrote.

Another reader might help you catch errors.

2. Use the gestation approach—Let your correspondence sit for a while.

Then, when you read it, you’ll be more objective.

3. Read backwards—You can’t do this for content. You should read backwards only to slow yourself down and to focus on one word at a time to catch typographical errors.

4. Read one line at a time—Use a ruler or scroll down your PC screen to isolate one line of text. Again, this slows you down for proofing.

5. Read long words syllable by syllable—How is the word responsibility misspelled? You can catch this error if you read it one syllable at a time (re-spon-si-bl-i-ty).

6. Use technology—Computer spell checks are useful for catching most errors. They might miss proper names, homonyms (their, they’re, or there) or incorrectly used words, such as device to mean devise.

7. Check figures, scientific and technical equations, and abbreviations—If you mean $400,000, don’t write $40,000. Double-check any number or calculations. If you mean to say HCl (hydrochloric acid), don’t write HC (a hydrocarbon).

8. Read it out loud—sometimes we can hear errors that we cannot see.

For example, we know that a outline is incorrect. It just sounds wrong.

An outline sounds better and is correct.

9. Try scattershot proofing—Let your eyes roam around the page at random. Sometimes errors look wrong at a glance. If you wander around the page randomly reading, you often can isolate an error just by stumbling on it.

10. Use a dictionary—If you are uncertain, look it up. If you commit errors in your technical writing, your readers will think one of two things about you and your company: (a) they will conclude that you are stupid, or (b) they will think that you are lazy. In either situation, you lose. Errors create a negative impression at best; at worst, a typographical error relaying false figures, calculations, amounts, equations, or scientific or medical data can be disastrous.