Writing, for most people, is stressful. Writing on a deadline is even more so. I’m sure most of us can recall prorcastinating on an essay until the last minute, then scrambling to get it done the day before it is due.

No one, however, can procrastinate better tahn the student journalists here at Van Nuys High School. Yessir, we are pro crastinators, indeed.

We’re so focused on procrastinating, in fact, that we don’t even have time to proofread. Even when we do, we usually end up glossing over some majro mistakes.

Take our Wereworlf by Night Review, for example. There’s a sentence that goes, “A group of monster hunters (which includes Laura Donelly’s Elsa Bloodstone, Ulysses’s daughter, and Gael Garcia Bernal’s Jack Russell)…” For those of you who can’t spot the error, the list of characters should not have been written the way it had been. The phrase Ulysses’s daughter could be interpreted as either Elsa Bloodstone is Ulysses’s daughter or the characters in this movie are Elsa Bloodstone, Jack Russell, and Ulysses’s daughter – the author, of course, meant the former. It’s so sad, really; the mistake could have easily been fixed by rewriting the sentence as “(which includes Gael Garcia Bernal’s Jack Russell and Laura Donelly’s Elsa Bloodstone, Ulysses’s daughter).” It’s such a shame that the author of the review decided to procrastinate instead of proofread.

Other grammatical errors can’t hide, though. Do you realize, for example, how many times superlatives are used in our articles? There’s this article under the Opinion section called The Importance of Perfect Timing, where, I kid you not, the author repeats the sentence “timing is everything” several times throughout the article. Superlatives, as my English teacher puts it, are “the kiss of death in your writing.” They’re dangerous to use; they tel the reader that the author has no sense of grammar whatsoever. Seriously, never use superlatives. Oh, yeah, and always proofread your writing.

This advice, however, doesn’t just apply to the online articles. In fact, it aplies even more to the print editions, because if you make one small mistake, it’s more or less ingrained in the paper forever, cementing your embarrassment in the ever-growing walls of history.

Remember the voting rights editorial in our November print edition? Well, there’s a mistake in there, too. If you read past the magenta ink stains, there’s a sentence that reads “And yet, what do they, the 18-year-olds?” Obvously, the sentence is missing the word “do” at the end; it should read, “And yet, what do they, the 18-year-olds, do?” Of course, you only have the author to blame for this one. He – and yes, the author was a he – was too busy procrastinating to start proofreading.

The lesson of the day, clearly, is to not procrastinate when you write. Otherwise, you might – no, you will – forget to proofraed.