Santosh Rathod

A common question among people starting a business whether or not they should incorporate. Incorporation means that your company is a separate legal and financial entity from yourself. Legally a corporation is treated as a citizen. It even has its own social security number for tax purposes, called a Federal Tax ID.

Most people incorporate to limit their personal liability so that they shield their personal assets. For instance, if your incorporated business was sued and found liable for damages, the winner could not take your personal car or home. Furthermore, incorporating creates a more professional image, and often helps with your taxes. If you plan to receive outside investment to grow your business corporation is the way to go. Incorporation protects you in many regards, but it does not protect you from any criminal charges by you or the corporation. You can’t hide behind your corporation to commit illegal acts and expect to be free from liability.

By investing cash or other property in your corporation you become an owner of an interest. In exchange for your personal investment you are issued stock in the corporation. A person with that ownership interest is called a stockholder or shareholder. Once you become a shareholder your liability is normally limited to the value of the cash or other property you have contributed to the corporation in exchange for stock.

As a general rule, the shareholder’s assets not invested in the corporation are safe from the corporation’s creditors. A shareholder may become personally liable for corporate debts if the corporation is not formed in compliance with or it operates in violation of applicable statutes, or if the corporation is functioning as a mere front for its shareholders rather than for corporate purposes. In other words, if you are simply creating a corporation to avoid liability, may become personally liable.

Under certain circumstances, corporate officers may be held personally liable for the corporation’s failure to pay state and federal income tax withholdings. Additionally, a shareholder may be required to personally guarantee a loan of the corporation in order to satisfy a lender. If a shareholder does so, his liability is no longer limited to the value of his investment in the corporation.

The business affairs of your corporation are managed by the board of directors and officers. The directors are elected by the shareholders. For this reason, while shareholders have the ultimate control of a corporation because of their stock ownership, the every day management lies with the board of directors through its officers. In small corporations the shareholders, directors and officers are often the same persons.

Many people are under the assumption that proofreading is an “innate” ability. The reality is that it is actually an acquired skill. By following these tips, you can transform yourself into the expert proofreader you’ve always dreamed of becoming!

1. You are the best judge of yourself. By this I mean that you can determine exactly what your most common mistakes are. Whether it’s placing the “e” before the “I,” or simply forgetting the semi-colon; once you familiarize yourself with your most common mistakes, proofreading will become much easier.

2. Remember, proofreading is not about misspelled words only; most likely those are caught by the application you are using like MS Word spell checker. You must look for incorrect sentence structure, repetition, and text which does not flow well together.

3. Leave the document for a while, and return with new eyes. If you walk away from your work and take a quick break, then return, you will find your outlook has changed completely!

3. Slow down and read out loud! So many errors are caught when you read the text slow and out loud to yourself. You realize things like: this sentence sounds strange, or I repeated this word 5 times in the same paragraph!

4. Your subconscious plays tricks on you. Sometimes you read what you think SHOULD be there, not what is ACTUALLY there. So you must acquire the skill that overcomes the power of the subconscious. What is that skill? Simply reading what is actually on the page!!

5. Never settle for one quick glance over your paper. Read it several times to be sure that you have not missed any possible error.

6. Try to work with a friend or hire professional help. There is nothing like another set of eyes to look over your work for you. After working on a document for so long, it becomes too familiar. Having an unbiased party view your paper is never a bad idea.

7. Once a misspelled word, always a misspelled word. It has become faulty information embedded in your mind. Now it’s no problem when the word is misspelled in a way that MS Word will catch it, but the absolute worst thing is when the misspelled version happens to be a word too! In that case, the application absolutely will not catch that error! For example: your and you’re OR sea and see.

8. The one second you aren’t on your guard, paying attention, you may end up misspelling or incorrectly structuring a sentence. Remember that your mind works faster than your fingers. Always remember that when you proofread somebody else’s work you are more likely to detect errors than proofreading your own work.

Professionals proofread their work over 10 times. Now, by following these guidelines, you can too!