Lick the button

On our team, I’m still one of the newbies. Even though I’ve been in the technical communication field for 4+ years now, 2+ at Blackbaud, I’m surrounded by seasoned veterans who have geek speak coursing through their veins. It can be intimidating. I should feel like I’m past the rookie phase at least but it’s hard when I’m around other technical writers who can knock out a tough new feature in record breaking speed. Okay, maybe it’s not that dramatic but it can feel that way when I write, and rewrite, and rewrite some more because the language doesn’t sound right. Then, there are the times that no matter your best attempts at writing you make a silly little mistake that can produce really funny results. The most famous, not done by me though, is when someone wrote “click the button” but somehow missed the first c. I bet if we asked you to lick the button in a procedure you’d think twice about how effective that’d be to complete an import .

Last year, I did such a blunder in a piece of documentation I emailed to my team to review. Little did I know when I was copying and pasting that I didn’t get all of the “if” in “If you..” so inadvertently I would have completely offended all of you. Of course when my manager caught the error it made me gasp in horror. I was thankful we have processes in place for editing. Because even while I am a rookie, these types of mistakes can happen to anyone. We’re told repeatedly in school (at all levels) how important editing is and having a big blooper like that happen to me was a great lesson. You’re never too experienced to make a mistake and spell check won’t find everything. Make sure you take the time to have another pair of human eyes check your documents; it could potentially save you from some severe embarrassment.

Friendly Suggestion - Create an editing process in your organization so you know what you need to do with a document before you send it to your donors, important stakeholders, or the media. As my mother used to say… “Proper planning prevents poor performance.”

Do you have any funny examples of this happening to you?