PerfectIt is easy to use. However, some of its advanced functionality is only described in the help file (that almost no one reads). So even if you’ve been using PerfectIt for years, you might not have discovered everything it can do. Here are five tips and tricks that will help you get more from the program.

The ideal of a paperless office has been talked about for decades. In the last century it turned out to be nothing but a fantasy. However, a generational shift combined with improvements in technology has changed that.

Writing is a reflection of an attorney’s abilities. And loss of trust in an attorney’s written work is the beginning of the end for any attorney’s career. Surprisingly, it’s the cosmetic and seemingly non-substantive errors that cause the reader to determine that a junior attorney is sloppy, uncaring and untrustworthy.

With more than 11 million plays and incredibly catchy lyrics, indie rock band Vampire Weekend’s song ‘Oxford Comma’ has generated heated online debate about its meaning.

If you're writing an article, book, proposal, or any formal document, then muddling your geography is a bad mistake. Geographic mistakes can not only lead to the rejection of your document, but you're also likely to offend your reader along the way. You never know who will be reviewing your work, or what their background is; so even a seemingly small mistake (such as not knowing who the Dutch are) can be costly.

I've never understood why people think I must be a good editor just because I designed PerfectIt. PerfectIt is used by over 1000 professional editors around the world, including over 400 members of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. But I didn't design PerfectIt because I'm a good editor. I designed it because I'm a terrible editor!

If your text includes numbers, you’ve probably found that deciding when to use numerals and when to spell numbers out is trickier than many people think. It’s certainly more complicated than any simple rule you were taught in school!

The majority of users (59%) run PerfectIt after they edit / proofread the text. However, some 4 in 10 users also, or only, run PerfectIt before they edit their text. Why are user habits so different?

By beating Gary Kasparov in 1997, Deep Blue proved that a computer could beat the best in the world at chess. But what about editing documents? For years, the idea of computer-aided editing was little more than a joke. However, in the age of voice recognition and machine translation, have computer checkers reached the point where they can defeat professional editors at what they do best? One editor agreed to take the challenge.

Oftentimes, we consult our favorite references—usage guides, dictionaries, and style guides are among the usual suspects—and blindly follow what we read. But print works become outdated so quickly. Does the advice accurately reflect what's happening in language today?

Thomas Mann observed that "a writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people". That's because professional writers know they need to eliminate obstacles to understanding. The more such obstacles they eliminate, the easier it is for readers to focus on the thoughts being conveyed.

Lists, bullets and numbers help to make text stand out (especially when they're used sparingly). But if there are errors in the text, those errors will stand out too. It doesn't matter that details like capitalization or punctuation inconsistencies seem small. The truth is that if they're in a bulleted/numbered list, they'll leap out at readers.

Throughout history, authors have relied on their editors to be their sounding boards, to represent the eye and ear of the reader, and to bring a viewpoint that can't arise spontaneously in the author's head. Do you think that has changed because words are written electronically?

We counted up the number of mistakes when using abbreviations in documents published online, and the results make depressing reading. So here are five things you can check so that your documents make the best impression and you make sure you get proposals, reports and articles accepted.

Since spelling and grammar checkers don't test consistency, documents can seem to be error-free and yet still contain lots of mistakes. Consistency mistakes are notoriously difficult for authors to spot, but they jump out at readers and cast doubt on the author's ability.

It happens to everyone. You think you've finished your work, so you send a document to the printers or email it to your client. One problem: you actually weren't quite done and major embarrassment is on the way. If you're working in MS Word, here's a checklist of five things you should review before you press print

It's not as poetic as Shakespeare's eternal question, but the choice of whether to capitalize the verb 'to be' in titles continues to be pondered through the years. For most people, difficulties with capitalization in titles started at around 9 years old. When your teacher was asked if you're supposed to capitalize all the words in a title, he/she probably said to "capitalize the first and last words and then capitalize all the big words."

When the software on your computer runs an update, do you notice the difference? Software companies spend millions improving and updating their software. But can you actually tell? Over the past two years, we've released around 20 updates to PerfectIt.

We used PerfectIt, Intelligent Editing's add-in for MS Word that finds inconsistencies, to check 3000 randomly selected documents. PerfectIt provides a powerful way to check for inconsistent capitalization because it: Finds entire phrases in capitals, not just individual words; ignores headings and other locations where capital letters are needed; only alerts users to phrases that are both capitalized and lowercase in the same document.

Would you trust a five star hotel offering 'luxry accommodation'? Or an online retailer who asked for your 'adress' in a contact form? I wouldn't. And I'm not alone. However, even if you believe that most of your customers don't care about spelling errors, ignoring those who do is terrible business practice.