A world without copyediting…
What would the world look like without copy editing?
Surprisingly, a world without copyediting, all the writing we are exposed to in every aspect of life would be hard to read. Everything written would be hard to understand and confusing. Can you imagine for a few seconds reading a newspaper, magazine, or product pamphlet littered with grammatical errors?
If your answer is no, you are thinking correctly as reading this would be such a difficult task. Reading should be an enlightening experience whereby you learn something new, but without unsightly mistakes. Mistakes add more displeasure to reading what is written, as it makes you want to stop reading. It gives you the impression that the writer did not take any care in looking over their work.
Marketing communications with grammatical errors are embarrassing, so proofreading is a requirement.
Billboards, sales sheets, product instructions, press releases and biographies can have embarrassing mistakes as well. I have bought furniture that had to be assembled at home, and the directions, which came with it, had a quite a few grammatical errors. Unfortunately, I ended up putting the bookshelf together incorrectly. Then, it is not fun to take it apart and reassemble it, which is a pain… In addition, this was very frustrating and a total waste of my time. These are just some of the many written works within the world of writing that can have errors if no copyediting was done. Furthermore, this is why proofreading too is important, to avoid costly mistakes for the consumer.
It is a scary thought that writing in English on a global scale would have errors. proofreading is the solution to mistake free writing.
This is hard to imagine as it would affect all written forms of communications in English and foreign languages. First of all, in the business world, much of the foreign language is taken from the English language. Having written errors here would also throw off the writing translated within other languages too.
Moreover, this would be a very chaotic scenario within the marketplace when companies give inaccurate information to their customers. The negative outcome would be a loss of sales for the company, for instance.The world would be even more chaotic than it is today as everyone would be confused when communicating with one another. When people cannot read and write correctly, confusion would reign supreme. Lastly, this is the reason we cannot have a world without copy editing.