You can almost see the eyes rolling in frustration and hear the tuts … yes, that’s the sights and sounds of readers spotting a mistake in something you’ve written.

This zero tolerance is for everything you write from blogs, website content or work reports to your CV and job applications. Absolutely everything.

During my days on a busy daily newspaper, people would pick journalists up on the slightest mistakes in anything they’d written – be it a typo, a grammatical gaffe or, God forbid, a great big glaring error.

It can happen. I’ve even seen a front page headline proclaiming Snow Choas (instead of chaos in case you’d not spotted it).

The fact you may have written 10,000 words correctly but then made a couple of typos won’t save you. Readers expect writers to get it right first time, every time. Shockingly, they’ve also every right to expect that.

So, here are 10 tips from Andy Hirst at AH! PR on how to do it.

* Always spell-check everything you write.

* Yet don’t rely totally on the spell-check as you may be using the USA version and they don’t spell everything like we do. I mean, they don’t even put a u in color. Can you believe that? Spell-check can also give wrong suggestions.

* So, spell-check it but also read it carefully to look for errors yourself as though it’s not been spell-checked. Yes, life’s complicated, I know.

* Watch out for three main potential mistakes – spelling, punctuation and grammar. In terms of punctuation, for instance, how many garages advertise they do MOTs by proudly proclaiming MOT’s here.

* Once you’ve read it a couple of times, ideally leave it overnight. When you read it again in the morning you’ll probably not only spot any mistakes you missed first time round, but you’ll also see ways to improve what you’ve written. Being a writer is being like an artist. Every time you go back to your work you’ll see something you’ll want to change. You’ll never be satisfied.

* The eye sometimes only sees what it wants to see. By that, I mean if you use the same word twice the eye will possibly only see it once until you’re re-read it a few times. A classic is using ‘the’ twice such as ‘the cow jumped over the the moon”, especially if the second ‘the’ comes immediately after a line break. Yes, I know I actually used ‘the’ three times in that sentence.

* If you can get a colleague to read what you’ve written, so much the better. Four eyes are better than two (even though that sounds a tad Orwellian).

* Bizarrely, if you print what you’ve written off it’s sometimes easier to spot mistakes. Many a time a journalist has written a story on a computer screen, submitted it and then a basic error has jumped out of the newspaper page the next morning and hit them right smack between the eyes.

* Make sure you’re concentrating when proof-reading, not merely going through the motions. If you’re not giving it 100% you’ll miss the errors.

* Some people like to proof-read aloud so they’ll notice when a word or sentence doesn’t sound right. There’s certainly nothing wrong in talking to yourself.

A final option is to ask a professional such as AH! PR to proof-read it as Andy may not only spot and correct any errors, he’ll no doubt find ways to improve how it reads and add in keywords and SEO if it’s a blog or website content.

Contact Andy at AH! PR at andy@ah-pr.com or phone 07985 654822.