I’m getting truly tired of reading blog posts riddled with spelling and grammar errors. If you’re a professional, please check your work!
14 Comments
14 Comments
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Comments
Me to!
LOL. It took me about 30 seconds to get the qwerty comment.
bah ef thire’s won theng thee werld kneads liss ef et’s grammmar und speling perlice. Seriously though the occasional or semi occasional spelling and grammar mistakes don’t bother me. Then again I’m not a stickler for rules and doing things by the book.
Can you give any examples of all these spelling errors? We all make mistakes and I’m happy to forgive the occasional error, but consistent mistakes would get annoying.
I’m not relly bothered by a few typo’s or error’s, either. Im sure their are a few in my blog posts. I was just complaning because Ive been seeing more and more blogs with really glaring erors throughout the posts. For instance, I red one blog today that didnt’ have one complete sentence in the first two paragraphs’. Another blogger managed to put every single apostrophe in the wrong place. Iv’e also seen people using completely mispelled words (words that should have been caught by a word procesing program) in the titles’ of their posts. It just kind of makes me feel like these people dont care very much about their work. ;)
I’m with graywolf. First, spell checkers do NOT fix many common grammar and spelling errors. And second, content is more important than details. I’m not going to miss brilliant insights because I am unable to overlook spelling errors. @sarahdeh84 - are you making the same point that qwerty was in the comment immediatly above this one? That comment is riddled with errors, so if that is not intentional I want to point out that we only recognize the mistakes WE know about; we - and I include myself big time - make tons of mistakes we don’t recognize that others could certainly critique. I often privately send corrections to other bloggers and greatly appreciate those who see errors I miss and let me know so I can correct them. The reason most people don’t do much, if anything, is fear of making mistakes. Perfectionists cut their productivity in half or more obsessing over never publicly making an error. If we can all just lighten up a bit we’ll all have a lot more fun, learn more, and do more. Will the world really end if we spell something wrong and others notice? Will it matter in a year, or ten years, or one hundred? If "mortified" is a regular word in your vocabulary consider how emotionally laden that is compared to the actual incidents you apply it to and how trivial they really are. The more brilliant someone is the more easily criticism can send them off to their cave, so do be gentle. Over-sensitive types often have little self-esteem from being constantly criticized by the masses who don’t understand them.
Stating the obvious, noone is perfect, so occasional typos, misspellings, grammatical errors are tolerable. However, for me, consistent mistakes in blog posts take away from the reading/learning/gratification experience, regardless of the quality of content. I hope that more bloggers, novice to professional, take the time to focus on quality delivery.
I also completely agree. With today’s technology -- heck, even with spell check built into Firefox 2+ -- it’s not like it’s a huge deal to go through and re-read your work. Even it’s a small comment like this. Being professional matters.
I’m with graywolf and flying rose. I’m rarely bothered by typos and spelling errors. For example, I can deal with all the errors in sarahdeh84’s comment above with no particular problem. (Though I am amused by the irony that the comment is a lament about typos and grammatical errors on the part of others!) I’m more bothered by non-informational content, repetitious content, or other issues. When I see that, I don’t return. But typos? I’ll return over and over if the information and content are useful. But that’s just me.
I’m glad that people decided to comment on this one. For all of you who aren’t bothered by spelling and grammar errors, that’s great that you can judge content solely on the information it contains. However, I still feel that if you are writing professionally, taking the time to check your work over shows respect for yourself and your readers -- even if you don’t manage to catch everything. @flyingrose -- yes, the errors were intentional. It was meant to be a joke, but I guess it was a bit lame. Sorry for that.
@sarah - I don’t know you that well yet so I wasn’t sure. What I think many are missing is that the mistakes are frequently not due to lack of care or failure to proofread; a writer can not catch errors they do not know are errors. Some had the benefit of a superior education or recognize errors because they are big readers. Many others received truly mediocre educations and simply do not have spelling and grammar skills many take for granted. How bad are our schools? When my family moved from Albuquerque where I attended an elementary school on an Air Force base to central California - which at that time spent more per pupil than any other state - I was a full two years ahead! Part of that was due to my having had an exceptional fifth and sixth grade teacher; however, that doesn’t account for the material I was being taught in California in 7-8 grade being what was on the regular 5-6 grade curriculum in New Mexico. And it has all been substantially "dumbed-down" ever since. Although better than most, my own grammar skills are somewhat lacking and I took English, Journalism, and German as electives every semester throughout high school. Only two years of basic English were required even back then. And I then took both English and German in college. (Studying a foreign language reinforces understanding of spelling and grammar.) When IBM started laying off secretaries and management had to type their own correspondence, the PROFs system we used alerted you to any words above a seventh grade level and automatically ran spell-check. The errors in blogs today are not anywhere nearly as bad as what managers were sending out - and they all had to have at least Bachelors degrees and almost always a Masters. I always ran that level checker just to find out what words IBM thought our almost entirely college degreed employees back then would not understand! I read and encourage bloggers whose authors’ native language is not English. When others criticize them I ask them how many languages they speak or write - many Americans aren’t very literate in just one! I hope Americans are also becoming more familiar with the differences in spelling between U.S. English and most other English speaking countries. I cannot count the number of times I’ve seen Americans criticizing spelling that is proper in another country or an alternate accepted version in our own dictionaries - which do not always agree.
I’d agree with Sarah (and wrote about it on SEOmoz a while back - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/bad-grammar-on-a-blog-is-like-a-dirty-toilet-in-a-restaurant). I’ll also hold up my hands and admit that my own posts aren’t perfect, though I do try to correct errors when they’re pointed out. I also think that flyingrose raise an interesting point regarding US & UK (or Australian etc..) English. I wonder which is taught more commonly in countries where English is not the primary language.
The search numbers on mispelled words is enough excuse to ignore the spell checker for blogging.
I am not too bothered if there are a couple of typos in a brand new story, posted only minutes or hours ago, as sometimes there is a bit of a rush to get stuff out there first. However, if they are still there the next day, then that doesn’t say much for the quality control of the poster. On that note why doesn’t the spell checker here recognise Google or SEO as being real words?