Dotting the i

by: Romany Howes (5 November 2014)

Recently I was given a piece of work to proofread which included a number of instructions including this: “Can you make sure that I have included all tittles?“ Accustomed to proofreading for international students and having to sometimes second guess their spelling, my first instinct was to check and correct every heading. I dutifully sent off the document when complete and to my surprise, it came back querying the “tittles”, this time with the explanation that the client’s computer often missed them off. Huh?

Again, I checked and changed wherever necessary and again it was returned with the same plea: “please insert all the tittles?”

Then I did what I should have done prior to any correspondence: I looked up the word tittle and guess what? A tittle is the dot on the letter i. Now I didn’t know that!

Humbled, I rechecked the work and apologised profusely to the client. It just goes to show that you can’t take anything for granted when it comes to proofreading.

Image used with permission from Microsoft.

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