Do you flap when you think about apostrophes? If worrying about how many c's and m's there are in ‘accommodation' leaves you yelling incorrectly-punctuated and badly-spelt expletives, you need professional help.
Don't be road-kill
Lying on the side of the electronic information highway are countless casualties - carelessly-tossed words - the road-kill of email, chat rooms and blogs. And it isn't just the pedants who bemoan about the fall of civilisation as we trip over a badly-placed comma. Mistakes in your website create a terrible impression. Not only do mistakes make reading your website difficult, they will instantly create a poor impact.
Get your copy right
- A wrongly spelt word can stop the flow of your copy. It trips up the reader.
- A poor use of grammar and punctuation will make your website difficult to navigate; readers will quickly click away to a more digestible website.
- A spelling mistake suggests you are unreliable, unprofessional and untrustworthy – after all, if you can't get that right, what can the customer expect from your product?
Website copywriting and quality control
Unlike traditional print material such as newspaper or magazine copy, many websites don't have editors. They are not always quality controlled or subjected to a scrutinizing editorial eye. As a result, they can read badly – which will have a direct impact on your sales or company image.
Easy as ABC
Spelling isn't as easy as ABC, and even spell checkers on computers can trip you up. Vivian Cook is the author of Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary (spelt deliberately wrong!) The book examines why spelling is so difficult. Words are not always spelt the way they sound and sometimes spelling has no clear logic. Consider the word sapphire, why not ‘safire'?
Common mistakes:
- Using the word compliment when complement is meant. Compliment means praise (remember the ‘i' in praise), whereas complement is to supplement (remember the ‘e' in supplement).
- Mixing up license instead of licence. License is the verb, licence the noun. So you own a driving licence, but you are licensing a pub. You have a TV licence but you can find out more about TV licensing.
- Practice and Practise present similar problems. Practice is the noun (A doctor's practice). Practise is the verb (A doctor is practising medicine).
- Principal and principle are commonly misused, principle is a conviction strongly held. Principal is a college teacher, or it can also mean main or chief.
Spelling and grammar are not logical, they have to be learnt. It comes down to standards. You would not go to an important business meeting dressed in a sloppy tracksuit, just as you should not have poor grammar or spelling on your company's website.
2 B or not to B?
But society is changing; text messaging and emails have resulted in a plethora of abbreviated words that throw the rules of grammar out of the window. Some may think it's time the orthographic pendants GAL (Got a Life). Technology and e-communication has introduced abbreviations such as FYI (For Your Information) that have changed how we write. But it's more than abbreviations; people are becoming more familiar too. A survey by MSN Hotmail revealed that one in 20 people wrote ‘love and kisses' at the end of emails to their employer. A line is being crossed. Either that or the entire nation is in urgent need of collective therapy. Technology is breaking down etiquette. But don't be fooled into thinking grammar and spelling no longer matter on your website. Technology, when used correctly can make communication more effective. It's all very well discarding grammar when you are sending a text to a mate, but the problem is when that reaches a wider audience.
Understand the rules to break them
The only effective way to use mistakes in language is for an advertising slogan for example – drinka pinta milka day – where people recognise the mistake and realise it's a clever use of language. It's fine to break the rules to aid communication if it makes a sentence more understandable - as long as you know you are breaking them. The rules are there for a purpose: to aid communication. You have to understand the machinery to work with it.
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