The word 'colour' in one location but 'color' elsewhere. Within a single list, some items ending in a semi-colon but others having no punctuation.Ī figure called 'Graphic 1' being followed by another called 'Image 1'. Numbers spelled out in one location but in numerals elsewhere. Two headings at the same level but one in title case and the other in sentence case. The phrase 'decision-making' in one location but 'decision making' elsewhere. The word 'Government' in one location but 'government' elsewhere. Table 1: The Ten Most Common Consistency Errors RANK Table 1 shows the ten most frequent errors and the proportion of documents in which they appeared. This approach allowed us to compare the results for different categories and identify the most common errors without favouring any particular kind of error.

For example, if the phrase 'decision-making' appears in three locations and 'decision making' (without the hyphen) appears in ten locations, should that count as one, three or ten errors? To overcome this problem, we simply measured the proportion of documents that contained at least one consistency mistake in each category. There is no established way to count the frequency of consistency errors. Instead of painstakingly looking for each error, PerfectIt scans an entire document in seconds, leaving you more time to focus on the things that matter most: your words and their meaning. The program quickly locates consistency mistakes throughout the text. However, the best way to improve consistency in documents is to run PerfectIt. The Top 10 errors listed below give authors and editors a reminder of important things to check before documents are published. The first line of defense against consistency errors is simply being aware of them. Automate Your Consistency Checks for Error-free Documents PerfectIt provides a powerful way to compare the frequency of inconsistencies because it automatically checks for the worst errors in several different categories right from MS Word, including:Įach of the 2400 documents we tested was over 1000 words and was downloaded from the internet using the search term 'final report'. So we used PerfectIt – the Microsoft Word Add-in– to check 2400 documents for consistency errors. If authors and editors are to improve consistency in their documents, they need to know what sort of errors to look for. Reports, proposals and articles that suffer from inconsistencies are more likely to be rejected.

Inconsistency in writing has a major impact on readers.

Top 10 writing proofreading software