OK, not the most thrilling of questions, but I’m interested nonetheless. I’m always a little conflicted over this. One part of me thinks: look, I’m a writer, writing is my craft, I should aim to make everything I produce of the highest possible quality, whether it’s a novel, a short story or a 500-word post.

But then the demon (or is it an angel?) on my other shoulder whispers: nah, don’t stress so much. It’s a blog. It’s supposed to be spontaneous, human, real. It’s supposed to convey something of your personality (though I’m not sure what some of my posts reveal about that). What does the odd typo, cliché or misplaced apostrophe really matter? Most people won’t judge you for the odd mistake.

In the end I guess I lean more towards the first point of view, but take something from the second too. I do think it shows some respect to readers to take a least reasonable care. I redraft my posts at least a couple of times, then do a last scan/proofread before uploading. And after all, I am supposed to be in the habit of spotting and correcting errors. If I produce a sprawling, incoherent splurge of a post, what does that say about me and my attitude to my work?

On the other hand, a blog post isn’t the final draft a book before publication, nor a competition entry, nor a query letter to an agent. It doesn’t really hurt if it’s not 100% perfect, and I don’t really believe most people expect it to be. Therefore I don’t proofread everything to the nth degree. (Though I am anal about apostrophes – can’t stand it if they’re wrong.)

However if I spot an error after posting, I usually can’t bear to let it be. A recent example, in my post Your pulse in the pages: music to inspire your writing, I originally wrote that:

… good fiction can infer of kind of immortality upon its subjects.

As soon as the post went live, that word infer leapt out and poked me in the eye.  It was of course the wrong word – it should have been confer. (Or at least I’m fairly sure it should be – now I’m starting to doubt myself, so if anyone wants to correct me, feel free!) So I changed it (and then encountered WordPress’s occasional annoying habit of mucking up the formatting when you try to edit posts, but that’s another story). A touch obsessive perhaps, but it wasn’t correct and, knowing that, I wanted it to be right.

P.S. I absolutely know I will have made at least one error in this post. It’s just inevitable.