Wednesday August 13, 2008
Nice website, same about the grammar!
One surefire way of coming over unprofessional on your website is to mangle the English language with school boy grammar and silly spelling mistakes. This should be a first step to improving your online credibility and business communications image – improve your English skills if you need to. OK, I’m not perfect here myself, everybody screws up from time to time, but there are some obvious ones I see most days that make me think shoddy workmanship. Like it or not, you are judged on your use of grammar and that can mean a lost customer if you mess up.
It also applies to email, nothing looks more unprofessional than receiving an email without proper capitalisation, sentences started without a space after the last period, spelling mistakes and poor sentence structure.
You can and should develop your own writing style, that is how your written content comes across to readers. A good practice to get in is to read your email or web page copy out loud and see if it makes sense. If the communication is important, get someone else to read it before firing it out into the world.
Business is about communication and your image depends on your use of it.
Common grammar mistakes I see all the time are using their instead of they’re, your instead of you’re, to instead of too, and apostrophes everywhere they shouldn’t be (and missing where they’re supposed to be).
Spell checkers are a blessing, but you must make sure your grammar is spot on and the actual right words are used.
Happy righting!
