Y: It Matters

Some years ago, someone said every time you read a book, there’s always a detail you missed the first time. For a long time after that, whenever I re-read a book, I looked for the bits I’d missed. The same goes for movies- every time you watch it, there’s a detail you’ve missed before.

For example, today I watched The Wizard of Oz. I’ve seen that movie oh, about a thousand times. Today, I noticed Dorothy’s posy of flowers changes before she begins walking the Yellow Brick Road. The posy she’s handed has mostly purple flowers, then the posy changes to mostly yellow flowers, then back to purple. It’s a detail I’ve never noticed before.

Recently I wrote a piece for a client and for some reason, despite all my proofreading, I completely missed a blindingly obvious spelling mistake. Even worse- it was the client’s name that had been misspelled. Yes people, I committed the Cardinal Sin of Copywriting: misspelling the name of the client in a piece of copy. Luckily, it was picked up before the client saw it, but I beat myself up about it for days afterward. How could I miss that detail? How could I miss something right in front of my eyes? How could I miss it after all the time I’d spent reading and re-reading the piece?

Of course, the best thing about mistakes is that you always remember them. Hopefully, you never make them again. So while I can no longer claim my strength is ‘attention to detail’, I’m always going to check, re-check and check again the client’s name before I press Send.

(In case anyone was wondering, I left out the Y in their name, hence the title of the post.)