Getting possessive about proofreading

So I was at a party last weekend - and please don't get distracted by your amazement at such an unusual way for me to spend my leisure time - where I knew nobody except the hosts. A woman was telling her friends about how, when shopping, her daughter had picked out a slab of chocolate with the iced message "Worlds best brother" on it. Naturally, the woman asked the shop assistant to add the missing apostrophe but this being Thorntons, which, like Barclays, has decided that ugly possessive punctuation clutters the brand, her request was met with incomprehension. The woman sensibly left without the chocolate. So far so unsurprising. But then... "Of course it needs an apostrophe," her friend responded, "Otherwise it's as if he's the whole world's brother." The first woman (who turned out to be a copywriter) paused and blinked. "It's a possessive apostrophe," she said. "Oh yes," agreed woman three, "It's the same as putting an apostrophe in "its". That really winds me up. The rule is simple. You should never do it." The first woman paused and blinked again, and I considered wading in to back her up but, being British and never having met these people before, well, to my shame, I didn't. Fortunately the conversation turned to misspellings (or possibly mispellings), to general relief.

When I tell people what I do, they tend to nod and agree that proofreading is very important and that correct spelling and punctuation and removing typos is essential for a professional reputation. But they never seem to think it applies to them. It's other people, those uneducated masses, who get it wrong. If you're in the know, you can proofread your own work. Well, yes, up to a point. My knowledge of grammar and spelling and punctuation is accurate enough to know when to break the rules and when the rules are fluid (editors like nothing better than to endlessly debate the relative merits of different style manuals - that's one reason I don't get invited to many parties). But I'm not ashamed to admit - because it's obvious - that I don't always pick up all the errors in my terrible typing. Sometimes it's late, sometimes I'm busy, usually I'm just plain lazy. I know how it is, how there always seems to be something better to do. But proofreading your own work is only the first level of defence. The second level is to find someone who will look at it objectively; being free from creative baggage, I have no difficulty in correcting other people's work. A fresh eye - a fresh perspective - will tidy and polish the text, and replace it gleaming on the mantlepiece of public opinion. Even if the public isn't all that sure what that opinion ought to be.

To shamelessly overload on the metaphors, adding an extra squeeze of icing is so much easier, and so much cheaper, than melting it all down and starting again.