The Happy Freelancer

By: Charles Gulotta

About a hundred years ago, I was working as a copywriter at a New York advertising agency. Because of the agency’s small staff, we all had to perform multiple tasks. I was responsible for copywriting, typesetting, and proofreading, as well as meeting with clients, negotiating with printers, and a lot of other things I seem to have repressed. The job was demanding, but it gave me an invaluable chance to learn as much as I could about the ad industry.

One of the things I learned is something that also applies to life in general: It doesn’t matter how many times you do it correctly; it’s the slip-up that will determine your score. As with dialing a telephone number, sometimes you have to get everything right.

We were producing a large, glossy, four-color direct mail brochure. It was a very expensive piece, and I had to write the copy, set the type, and proof the whole thing before it went to print. The client was a substantial company with locations all over the world, including an office in Frankfurt, Germany.

You may have noticed that Frankfurt has the letter K right in the middle of its name. It appeared in several places throughout the brochure, and appeared correctly every time. Except once. For some reason, in one spot I had typeset it a letter short: Franfurt. Worse, when I proofed the piece, I failed to spot the error. Off it went to the printer. Thousands of big, beautiful four-color brochures, printed with a misspelling. When they came back and someone saw the mistake, the spotlight turned and shone right in my face. Not realizing the gravity of the situation, I pretty much laughed it off. It was one word, I thought. One word out of so many. What’s the big deal?

As I soon learned, the agency had two options: reprint the piece and eat the cost of the entire job, or give the client a significant discount to accept the imperfect version. Either way, we were losing money. That was the big deal.

Many years later, I needed to supplement my writing income, so I began doing some freelance fact-checking. This involved verifying every piece of information in book manuscripts — anything that could be shown to be incorrect, such as the capital of Madagascar (Antananarivo) or the gestation period of a rhinoceros (sixteen months). The rule was that if you could find something in three different sources, that was enough to call it accurate. The problem, of course, was that because of sloppy or absent fact-checking, a lot of things that weren’t correct were being published in books. And the more books they appeared in, the truer they became, even if they were completely wrong.

Things have changed since then, but then again, not really. Most research is now done online. But who are the authorities? With most searches I do, Wikipedia provides the first result. Do I trust that? The next few are usually websites that contain questions people have submitted — along with the answers other people have submitted. Sometimes, users vote on their favorite answer. Is the favorite answer necessarily the correct one? With the Internet, the possibility of repeating a mistake is much greater than it was with just books. Are we really sailing an ocean of information? Or are we drowning in a flood of nonsense?

And what’s the big deal now? Does anyone care about a misplaced apostrophe or a statistic with an extra zero? I do. And I think you should, too.

It’s about credibility. If someone reads your work and sees an error, that credibility could go right out the window. This may hurt you as a freelancer, but it could also hurt your client. The perception of carelessness can be taken to any extreme. (“They don’t care about the quality of their marketing materials. Maybe they manufacture their products the same way.”) And you don’t have to look far to find examples. Read almost any website, printed book, or newspaper article and you’re almost guaranteed to find something that someone should have caught, but didn’t. Which is just another reason to try to get as close to perfect as you can — your work will stand out, your client will look good, and your reputation as a professional freelance writer will be enhanced.

Remember, you don’t score points for what you do right — unless you do it all right. One typo, one factual error, one caption under the wrong picture, and that’s all anyone sees. It’s a lesson that has never left me.

Before sending this post to Heidi, I proofed every word, repeatedly. I looked carefully for grammatical errors and bad sentence structure. There weren’t really any facts to check, other than the gestation period of the rhinoceros and the capital of Madagascar, and I verified those four times each.

By the way, are you wondering how to pronounce Antananarivo? I have no idea. But I’m sure that’s how you spell it.

Charles Gulotta is a freelance writer whose blog, Mostly Bright Ideas, showcases his wonderfully witty insights. He has also written books about grammar, one of which, “Writing Rules!” I reviewed for this blog.