For me it is a curse. My fingers just can't type the same words that my brain thinks. So after any piece of typing I have to try and see where my fingers went wrong: a word missing, a letter mistyped, a punctuation mark in the wrong place. At school I managed once to achieve the accolade of five typos or grammatical errors in a single line of text. After that I put extra punctuation marks at the end of my work: telling the English teacher that he could add it where he thought it would go best. He was not amused.

Sadly with age my skills have got no better. However I now have to accept that it matters. An un-proofed document from me runs the same reputational risk as an un-serviced aircraft - my meaning may be lost, the reader may be distracted by my mistakes, or my scintillating words felled like a runner with untied shoelaces.

There is one effective way I have found to correct my own work. To find a quiet room and to read aloud what I have written and focus on every word and nuance. It's no good reading things over in my head. My mind wanders, I skip sentences, my brain knows what it's meant to see but it finds other things to do. Reading aloud (or asking somebody to proof my work) is the only thing that works.

I tell you all this because bad as I am at the small details I know they matter. And that's true for every communicator. Small mistakes in any communication have a disproportionately destructive effect. They act like a sort of reputational chewing gum on the sole of a shoe. So a misspelt name, an out-of-date website, a publication with the wrong number or just a few sentences of jargon-filled turgid text will potentially ruin whatever message you wanted to get across.

Don't waste hours of hard work for the sake of a few minutes checking. It just isn't worth it - even if my brain and fingers don't always see it that way.

Joe Saxton is chair and founder of CharityComms. In his day job Joe is driver of ideas and co-founder of specialist research consultancy nfpSynergy