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.

Language can be a potent force for good—or evil. It matters what we say, and how we say it. And writing matters even more than speech. Our words live on the page long after spoken words are forgotten. 

Hyphens are like little screws that hold words together. Now, if you’ve ever gone to a hardware store to buy screws, you know that there are a lot of different kinds of screws. But hyphens? They all look the same – well, within any specific font, anyway. So you might think there’s just one kind of hyphen. You’d be wrong. Full-on, abso-bloody-lutely wrong.

If you’re bidding for a contract or responding to a request for proposals (RFP), it doesn’t matter whether it’s small or large. From research funding in the thousands to infrastructure in the billions, there’s always a great deal at stake. Whether it’s jobs that depend on a contract or research that can alter lives, the outcomes of proposal documents could not be more significant. That’s why it’s crucial that your words make the best impression.

Put simply, true AI software for editing does not yet exist, and there are two major reasons why it will never replace the human editor. Firstly, editing is about more than correcting text. It’s about understanding and manipulating linguistic shade, colour and nuance; software works in black and white.

Editing is a great career choice – an editor can be independent, have variety in their day-to-day to routine, use their expertise, and contribute to the development of interesting and useful documents. However, working as an editor can also be isolating and it can make you feel powerless.

Non-breaking spaces, also known as no-break, non-breakable, hard or fixed spaces, are characters that look exactly like regular spaces. You cannot see the difference between a non-breaking space and a regular space either on the page or on most screens. The difference between a non-breaking space and a regular space is how it is treated if it happens to separate two words at the end of a line of text.

What’s the difference between a hyphen and a dash? Did you even know there was a difference? Lots of people use them interchangeably, but if you want to present a perfect document and stand out from the crowd, you need to understand the difference.

With each of these examples, you have a choice to make. Should you include these special marks, or leave them out? These are diacritical marks, or diacritics, and they include accents, cedillas and more. Often, the term ‘accents’ is used colloquially for all of them, and that’s the term we’ll adopt here.

Why do small mistakes slip through even when we try so hard to iron them out? Scientists are only beginning to come up with answers. For instance, psychologist Tom Stafford of the University of Sheffield explains that writers make errors because they are busy concentrating on the high-level task of conveying meaning, whereas readers pick up typos because reading requires less brain power.

With more than 11 million plays and incredibly catchy lyrics, indie rock band Vampire Weekend’s song ‘Oxford Comma’ has generated heated online debate about its meaning.

I've never understood why people think I must be a good editor just because I designed PerfectIt. PerfectIt is used by over 1000 professional editors around the world, including over 400 members of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. But I didn't design PerfectIt because I'm a good editor. I designed it because I'm a terrible editor!

If your text includes numbers, you’ve probably found that deciding when to use numerals and when to spell numbers out is trickier than many people think. It’s certainly more complicated than any simple rule you were taught in school!

The majority of users (59%) run PerfectIt after they edit / proofread the text. However, some 4 in 10 users also, or only, run PerfectIt before they edit their text. Why are user habits so different?

By beating Gary Kasparov in 1997, Deep Blue proved that a computer could beat the best in the world at chess. But what about editing documents? For years, the idea of computer-aided editing was little more than a joke. However, in the age of voice recognition and machine translation, have computer checkers reached the point where they can defeat professional editors at what they do best? One editor agreed to take the challenge.

Oftentimes, we consult our favorite references—usage guides, dictionaries, and style guides are among the usual suspects—and blindly follow what we read. But print works become outdated so quickly. Does the advice accurately reflect what's happening in language today?

Thomas Mann observed that "a writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people". That's because professional writers know they need to eliminate obstacles to understanding. The more such obstacles they eliminate, the easier it is for readers to focus on the thoughts being conveyed.

Lists, bullets and numbers help to make text stand out (especially when they're used sparingly). But if there are errors in the text, those errors will stand out too. It doesn't matter that details like capitalization or punctuation inconsistencies seem small. The truth is that if they're in a bulleted/numbered list, they'll leap out at readers.

Throughout history, authors have relied on their editors to be their sounding boards, to represent the eye and ear of the reader, and to bring a viewpoint that can't arise spontaneously in the author's head. Do you think that has changed because words are written electronically?

We counted up the number of mistakes when using abbreviations in documents published online, and the results make depressing reading. So here are five things you can check so that your documents make the best impression and you make sure you get proposals, reports and articles accepted.