Dumb Mistakes or Self-Sabotage?
Anyone who’s created written material for business or academics knows how easy it is to get fumble-fingers and slip in a typo or two. “Teh” instead of “the” is so common it’s become an Internet meme. Homonyms are also fertile ground for mistakes: “your” instead of “you’re,” affect vs. effect, there/their/they’re.
Sometimes people just don’t know how to spell a word and are too lazy to look it up. Or they select the wrong word for the job, with a meaning that’s slightly off-base, inserted as a “show-off” word–if you use big words you’ll look smart, right?
Modern word processing applications with spell-checker have helped somewhat, but they still can’t get rid of those pesky homonyms.
Check out this poem, titled “Ode To a Spell Checker:”
I have a spelling checker
I disk covered four my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot see.
Read the rest of it here: http://people.usd.edu/~bwjames/humor/spell.html
The real problem is this: dumb mistakes make you look dumb. Typos, grammatical or word-usage errors really impact your company’s credibility.
Case in point: I recently noticed a small business’s web site that had this tagline: “Streching your dollar.” Oops, it’s “stretching.”
Would you buy from this company? Or would you wonder what else they’d overlook?
Good copywriting, of course, is more than making sure everything is spelled right. A professional copywriter studies the product or service, studies the market and considers the individual buyers’ motivations. Then she writes content that delivers all necessary information factually, correctly and persuasively.
BUT . . . killer copy starts with killer accuracy. Get it right, or don’t write it at all.
Posted: July 14th, 2010 under Uncategorized.