In March, the editorial teams at PR Newswire bureaus in Cleveland, Albuquerque, and Washington, D.C., caught 12,215 errors in press releases.

So far in 2011, the teams have corrected 33,831 errors.

In a blog post published Monday, PR Newswire editor Kate Galo said:

“The PR Newswire editorial team frequently catches obvious mistakes in press releases submitted for distribution over the wire—the missing quotation marks, the website that doesn’t end in .com (or .org, etc.). But did you know we also read every release carefully, double checking minute details?”

The blog went on to list several common mistakes and how press release writers can avoid them. Here’s one example:

“A recent release highlighted a company’s efforts to begin a search for a new director. One of the proposed directors? Governor Charles “Christ.” A fun spellcheck fact: If a word is incorrect but is also a commonly spelled word, spellcheck is not going to find it! In this case, our editor Matt saw the incorrect word, confirmed that the governor’s name is Charles Crist and fixed it.”

If Matt had let that slip, it would have been manna from heaven for snarky bloggers.

Read the full blog post, with proofreading tips, at PR Newswire’s blog, Beyond PR.