Check your work

Think back to grade school. Think back to math tests. Remember what the teacher said at the start of every exam? "Check your work." The teacher knew that although you may know the heck out of long division or fractions, it's still easy to make really dumb mistakes - and the dumber the mistake, the easier it is to make. Worse, the smarter students are more confident of their ability to do error-free work, so they're less likely to catch their own really dumb mistakes. Sad but true: In my fifth-grade class, the class brain misspelled his own name on an exam. The teacher docked him three points for it, so he scored 97%.

We don't magically get over this when we finish school. What was true in grade school is still true, and it's more complex in the workplace because we aren't just answerable to ourselves; we rely on other people to do their work accurately, too.

You should be able to trust your teammates, but we all make mistakes. You won't make any friends by compulsively checking everyone else's work - and you'll run out of time to do your own work if you try - but if your organization doesn't already have a formal mechanism in place, you can set an example by asking your teammates to check your own work. "Do you mind checking this section for accuracy? If you like, I'll check whatever you have ready while you're looking at my material."

A couple things seem to cause a lot of trouble in technical writing and marketing collateral: company URLs and email addresses. I have seen far too many tech-savvy businesses (including IT service providers and multinational telecoms companies) publish contact email addresses that did not exist on their mail servers. They instructed their customers to contact them via email addresses that returned error messages. How smart would that make your company look? Although the warranty card may have always included the email address support@yourcompany.com and the URL www.yourcompany.com/support, that doesn't necessarily mean they work.

Take a few seconds to see what happens when you follow that link. Take a few seconds to send a test message to that email address, with an explanation and request for reply. Check your work.