Imagine you’re back in school and you have a final paper due for [insert your favorite class here]. As you’re walking to your classroom, printed essay in hand, you glance down only to notice that — egads! — you’ve used the wrong “your/you’re” in the very first sentence!

You should:

a) pretend you didn’t notice the mistake and turn it in as is
b) white out your mistake with the nail polish tucked in your purse for touch ups and hand it in
c) reprint the whole thing and vow to check over your work more thoroughly next time

If you answered ‘b’, you’re me circa 2008 and I have some news for you: don’t ever ever do that again.

Hopefully you are not 2008-era me and chose answer ‘c’.

Typos and errors are a reality, and even the most interesting and well-written essay, blog post, resume, etc. loses its credibility when it’s riddled with basic grammatical errors. Grammatical slip ups happen to the best of us, but if you take just 10 minutes after you write your next blog post to run through the following editing checklist, you’ll be able to catch the most common offenders and your writing will sparkle with all of its potential.

You can write your best blog post every time with this handy editorial checklist. It’ll help guide you as you check for common writing errors and slip ups (and who doesn’t want a little extra help with that!?)