One of the most effective quality-control and disaster-prevention tools ever developed is also one of the simplest: the checklist. Surgeons use checklists. Astronauts use checklists. Stage managers use checklists. And editors use checklists.

Health conditions are varied and complicated. They can cause pain, confusion, dizziness, slack jaw, belly aches… and that’s just their names! Take for example Stein-Leventhal syndrome, polycystic ovary syndrome, chronic hyperandrogenic anovulation, CHA, and PCOS. As different as they look, these five have something in common: they’re all names for the same thing.

Like birds and trees, abbreviations are often seen in the wild and seldom remarked on. But, like slime molds and toads, abbreviations come in more kinds than most people realize and, while some people find them repellant, others can be quite passionate about them.

If your goal is to get everyone in your organization or group to follow your house style—and to learn the principles behind it—there’s more to it than simply adding terms and adjusting settings in the Style Sheet Editor. The exact words you use to describe the issue make a difference.

We live in a capitalist society. Which means it’s full of businesses that are full of businesspeople who just love using Capital Letters because they seem Important.

Hyphenation can seem like the editor’s party trick. A party trick is something that few people know how to do, and while it’s not that important to most people, it’s always impressive to see someone pull it off. You know, like tying a cherry stem into a knot with your tongue.

Italics are like fancy dress for words. Seeing a word in italics is like going into your local grocery store and seeing someone working there in a samurai costume. “Well,” you think, “you’re certainly here to tell me something.”

There are five important things to watch for in numbered and bulleted lists. If you’re editing according to a style manual such as The Chicago Manual of Style, you’ll have good guidance for many of these things. But even if your style is entirely at your discretion, you’ll still want to think before you list.

Here’s a quick test on when to use a and an. Spot the errors: I was at an historic occasion, a meeting at a hotel near an university to discuss an HUD directive, when my recorder ran out of power. For want of an AA battery, my records of the meeting were lost, and it was all consigned to no more than a * in an MS.

How many slip-ups do you count? There are actually six mistakes in there. Let’s see what they are—and why!

Spellcheck is one of the most basic checks that editors and writers run on their documents. But those same editors and writers will tell you that spellcheck doesn’t always know what to do with complex or unusual terms like drug names.

With 193 member states, the United Nations could probably have 193 different style guides. Fortunately, the organization has settled on just one United Nations Editorial Manual. The comprehensive online guide includes style suggestions for everything from acronyms to numbering of maps and figures.

One event of 2020 that might have passed you by: using two spaces after a period is now officially a formatting error. At least, according to Microsoft. The extra space is now marked with a blue squiggly line. This may not have been the biggest news this year. However, it’s a joyful win in a long, painful battle between the die-hard double-spacers, relics from the time of typewriters and fixed-width fonts, and typographers, and their supporters, who feel passionately that the additional space is an insult to modern font designers.

The new version of PerfectIt is a bigger deal than that “.1” suggests. As with any new software version, it has lots of small fixes and improvements. However, it has one huge new capability. For the first time, you can control exactly what PerfectIt checks. Now you can turn PerfectIt into a custom checker designed (by you) to lift writing standards at your organization.

If you build your preferences into PerfectIt, then it can help raise writing standards at your organization. If there’s text that you don’t have time to check, you can use PerfectIt to help your colleagues avoid errors. Even on documents that you will check, PerfectIt can help your colleagues identify errors earlier and improve their own writing.

American Legal Style is an option in PerfectIt that transforms it into one of the most powerful, yet nuanced, proofreading programs available today for legal professionals.

The first line of defense against consistency errors is simply being aware of them. The Top 10 errors listed below give authors and editors a reminder of important things to check before documents are published. However, the best way to improve consistency in documents is to run PerfectIt.

As a medical writer, your team depends on you to catch errors, large and small. It’s your job to make sure that months or even years of hard work on a regulatory submission, grant application, or research article aren’t undermined by small imperfections that make a bad impression and weaken your team’s credibility.

If you have a cat or a dog, you know the first challenge in using medication to treat their health conditions is getting them to swallow the darn stuff. The same is true for health information with people, especially ordinary people with no special medical background. In order to be in control of your health, you have to be well informed about it. But people need that information in a form they can swallow.

Find and Replace is magic! Now, instead of spending hours searching and changing with the near certainty you’ll miss just one instance in the most embarrassing place possible, you can, with just a few clicks, make a much more hideously embarrassing screwup. Here are six cautionary tales for your edification.