Measure Twice, Cut Once

You may have heard the Carpenters’ adage, “measure twice, cut once”. It means to take extra care in order to prevent costly or irreparable mistakes from happening in your craftsmanship. 

Try to uncut a piece of wood or un-chisel a stone.

Similarly, try to pull back a message or piece of content after it has been read and received by one or many people.

If you are writing for business, whether an email, article or a LinkedIn post the rule is, before you hit “publish” or “send”, do the following:

• Run grammar check and spell check if you don’t already have it enabled ( you should ).
• If you are not sure of your message or verbiage, run it through ChatGPT / Perplexity.
• Do at least a few minutes of research to ensure you have your facts and attributions correct.
• Proof read. If you are not sure of your clarity, have a friend or co-worker read and provide edits to you.
• If the message is emotional, sleep on it. You may change your mind the next day and prevent damaging a relationship or your personal brand. It is actually best to try to write in a flat emotional tone. It is very difficult to convey humor or sarcasm in a message even if you use emojis. If you are even a little upset it will likely come across as anger and create bigger problems for you ( and your business ).

When you send a message that is poorly written or has obvious errors, there is a chance that your reader(s) will discredit you and / or what you have written. For some of us the errors jump off the page and can’t be unseen. It is fingers on the chalkboard. Graffiti on artwork. It’s not a trait that I love about myself, however I am one of three generations in my family who see even a small error in a large body of work, so I choose to embrace it as a superpower. 

However, there are many like me who see the errors and are less forgiving. It is more prevalent in an executive audience. In a major piece of writing, for example, a project, proposal or for a job it raises concerns about attention to detail. ( There are myriad stories of proposals with costly errors in the price calculations or terms & conditions ).

I shared a post on LinkedIn recently from someone who attempted to chastise me for what was arguably her mistake. In her note she wanted to say that people don’t read the preparatory information. What she wrote was that people “don’t ready the information”. Ouch. Her point was immediately lost for me.

Measure twice. Cut once. It costs us nothing and is worth the time and the effort.

(*Note: this article went through six edits, proofs and rewrites )