Whether we like it or not, readers judge a person’s intelligence and competence by their grammar and overall language use. A series of misspellings and poor language use in a blog post can make readers question your authority to even talk about your subject, and such language errors are likely to encourage them to search elsewhere for what you’re providing poorly.
Your Credibility, Authority And Expertise Are All Challenged
Online copy is a reflection of your image, brand, and company identity. When it’s anything else but perfect it makes readers question your suitability to cater to their needs.
Poorly written online copy can sabotage your marketing strategies considerably. In fact, people are put off by misspellings and other language usage errors. More often than not, they picture you as an unskilled and sloppy writer, whose lack of talent is probably evident in areas other than writing, as well.
This can obviously harm your credibility and authority as an expert in your field. No matter how exceptionally good you might be in what you do, people won’t be convinced if you constantly confuse “there” with “their.”
It might seem far-fetched, but in reality, bad writing skills actually end up undermining your overall expertise or knowledge, despite the fact that your language skills may not in any way be directly related to your subject of expertise.
Readers Are Discouraged From Becoming Your Customers
Once out there, it cannot be easily reversed. Content you published online is available for anyone to criticize. Grammatical errors and misspellings will cause unnecessary and entirely avoidable bad talk about your writing skills and overall efficiency as a blogging professional.
When people read your work and become aware of such mistakes, their attention shifts away from what you’re saying to how well you’re saying it. Once they spot a mistake in your writing, all they can think of is your incompetency to form proper sentences. While some readers won’t be bothered by a few grammatical or punctuation mistakes, others will be so terribly annoyed they would rather move onto another blogger.
You see, language use errors make readers think that you have to struggle to get things communicated in an error-free manner. Lack of confidence in your skills means they’re likely to turn to a competitor to buy someone else’s product, even if it’s the same thing you’re offering.
Potential consumers are driven away by both real errors and a fear of future mistakes. This causes you and your business money loss or a decrease in expected sales. People won’t trust an e-commerce website when it’s jammed with misspellings and poor grammar mistakes. “Will they mess up my order as well?” Is the first thing that comes to mind.
Association With Negative Concepts
You’ve invested a lot of money and effort in establishing your small business and to see that undermined by a few misspellings is infuriating. Not that bad language use will make your company go bankrupt, but its negative influence can be tangible nonetheless.
Poorly written online copy makes readers associate you or your company with carelessness, a lack of attention to detail, sloppiness, and unprofessionalism. These are definitely not characteristics you’ll want to have pop into mind when people think about your company.
Blogging and other social media activities are a reflection of your company, and a link to a constantly changing and growing audience. The Internet offers your company an opportunity to achieve exposure to previously impossible to reach audiences. Sabotaging that potential with sloppy, error-laden copy means wasting a great opportunity for lead generation and sales increases.
Eliminating all kinds of errors in grammar, word use, and punctuation is not impossible. Be diligent about following these rules and your copy will be spotless.
- Check spelling carefully. Twice. While spellcheckers are a great tool, don’t depend on them alone. Use your own eyes. A spellchecker won’t find contextually correct but typographically wrong copy (i.e “trough” won’t be flagged as a misspelling of “through”).
- Focus on copy checking. Make sure your page layout is properly formatted, that the font size, type and color are readable, and that any images and symbols are displayed correctly. Reader-friendly layout is crucial in inviting readers to stay on page.
- Proofread to eliminate any grammar, usage, and punctuation mistakes. However, don’t immediately proofread your writing. Proofread it a couple of hours later, or even on a different day. A fresher look is more likely to make errors pop out.
- Have someone qualified to proofread it too. A professional editor or proofreader can substantially improve your writing if you don’t seem capable of doing it.
- Be aware of common mistakes and look for those in your online copy. Everyone has common language traps they keep falling into. What are your weaknesses? Make sure to look for them in your copy. Even better, learn to prevent them from even happening by being conscious of them during the writing process.
- Read it out loud. Hearing your copy read out loud will help you shorten sentences, and will improve your copy overall, making it more reader-friendly and enjoyable.
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