Based on my own experiences as a writer, the eleventh secret of writing well is to flip your perspective while proofing your writing.  Pretend you haven’t just pulled your written words from your own brain. Pretend you are your audience instead. Ask yourself, “Does this make sense?”  The reason that this can be so important is that we tend to write what we already know, forgetting that our audience doesn’t know the same things.  Trying to read from our reader’s perspective helps us see what is needed to make the piece clear.

Mistake Number One:

An email at work contained the following phrasing, “Projects by the group is to be completed no later than Wednesday.” There were possibly two errors in this one. The first is subject/verb agreement-- It should have read, “Projects are to be completed.” The second error is that it is written in passive voice.

Mistake Number Two:

I saw the following verbiage on an Arby’s sign in Ogden: “If you want to get fat losen your belt and try our pork belly today.” I couldn’t stop laughing at this one.  Aside from the question itself being absurd (who wants to get fat?), they probably meant “loosen” rather than “losen.” They are also missing a comma between “fat” and “losen.”

Mistake Number Three:

I found this last mistake in an article about grammar errors, ironically enough.  The article is entitled, “Egregious Grammatical Errors Caught By Globe Readers.”  The section reads, “One wrote, ‘You've got to be kidding me’ before listing a few grammatical and spelling mishaps in The Globe.”  The author didn’t put a comma inside the quotation marks for the quote.