Why Speling, Spellin’ and Spelling are Important to Your Business

As I write this article in a coffee shop in Seattle, I can’t help but notice a glaring neon sign for a tourist trap across the street, nestled along the Puget Sound waterfront. This sign proclaims “Pirates Plunder” and sells plastic pirate toys, adorned hats, and various sundries worthy of any aspiring pirate. But something is bugging me. Does the sign imply a statement that pirates do, in fact, plunder? Or, are we missing an all important apostrophe to suggest that I will find all of the wondrous spoils of nautical war within; that once belonged to pirates but are now available at a bargain $1.99? Unfortunately, the latter is probably more likely.

Do Pirates Plunder Pirates’ Plunder?

Now, it’s fairly unlikely that this simple grammatical error is costing PP any significant money, even though countless professional article writers are likely forming a boycott of the business as we speak. People seem to be buying just as many plastic parrots on a seashell stand as they always have. But this is not always the case, especially online. In July of 2011, BBC News published the story of tightsplease.co.uk, a site that was marred by a costly typo. According to online entrepreneur and consultant, Charles Duncombe, this spelling error cost the website a little under half of their sales.

In the same article, Duncombe claimed that spelling is important to the credibility of a website, and poor spelling could cost your business thousands (if not millions) in potential sales. But the problem may not have been in a simple typo, but evidence of a steady decline in digital grammar that allows such mistakes to flourish. James Fothergill of the Confederation of British Industry stated that,

“Our recent research shows that 42% of employers are not satisfied with the basic reading and writing skills of school and college leavers and almost half have had to invest in remedial training to get their staff’s skills up to scratch.”

Communication has drastically shifted from pen and paper to a point where entire businesses are run digitally. The widespread availability of high quality wireless internet, and improvement of texting applications for smartphones, has allowed the online lingo form known as “leetspeak” or “textspeak” to hold American youth’s grammatical skills hostage, LOL.

How Important is the Apostrophe Anyway?

If Seattle’s neon signs are a microcosm of the worldwide trend towards poor grammar in business, pirates have even begun to plunder our apostrophes – and that’s going to cause problems. Let’s consider a hypothetical, but all too real, example of how a missing apostrophe (and one extra small error for emphasis) could cost your business millions of investment revenue.

Consider this example:

• We’re going to accept your offer. The price couldn’t be better.
• Were going to accept your offer. The price couldn’t be better?

While the first text clearly embraces an investor’s offer to buy your start-up for a cool $1 billion (aim high right?), the second text tells a very different, and potentially insulting, story. You could argue that you don’t even need the question mark for the text to suddenly take on a negative tone. You could also argue that negotiating $1 billion deals through a text message is not the wisest business decision. But what’s clear is that the absence of a simple apostrophe completely alters the tone of the message, putting it in the past tense, and possibly causing enough bad blood to destroy your deal.

It’s Not All Black and White

There are exceptions to the hard and fast rules of grammar, however. In fact, it’s pretty easy to find examples of poor grammar in advertising that, presented properly, would sound rather silly. Consider the following example:

Mike’s Soda: The Taste You’re Looking For!

This example breaks one essential rule of grammar – don’t end a sentence with a preposition. But the correct form of the advertising slogan sounds clunky and pretentious:

Mike’s Soda: The Taste For Which You’re Looking!

Suddenly, Mike’s Soda doesn’t sound as appetizing as it did before. The phrase is longer (which takes up valuable ad space) and it doesn’t seem to speak to the target audience that would suck down the sugary drink.

There’s nothing wrong with breaking the rules of grammar to speak to an audience more personally. Advertisers do this all of the time. We don’t usually speak with proper grammar (try to catch yourself ending sentences with prepositions when talking with your friends) and some marketers will argue that text advertisements should not break that conversational tone. Just how prevalent are these advertisements? There are at least two famous examples:

• Apple: “Think different” – Staunchly defended by Apple, this grammatical error (it should be “differently”) was meant to suggest that “different” was what we were thinking about.
• Coca-Cola: “Treat yourself well. Everyday.” – Launched for Dasani mineral water, this advertising slogan (correctly written as “Every day”) was explained away as a marketing choice, rather than a mistake.

How to Avoid Grammatical Mistakes in Your Business

Poor grammar can be costly to a business (or strategic). To stop pirates from plundering your well-meaning advertisements, follow these simple rules when preparing content:

1. Use a qualified editor. Not only can a good editor point out the nasty little mistakes in your copy, he can provide an extra pair of eyes to judge your writing quality.
2. Read content out loud. Reading a piece of content out loud can reveal silly errors or lack of clarity in your writing. Better yet, convince your editor to listen to you read the content.
3. Stop relying so heavily on spell checkers. They can’t catch everything. Auto-correct software can cause even more problems. I can specifically remember a time in my early days of copywriting when an auto-correct feature on Microsoft Word had me recommending that some children enjoy a few “smokes” at their local ski hill (instead of “slopes”).
4. Be more critical of email. Many businesspeople simply ignore email as being a quick form of communication that doesn’t need to be grammatically perfect. Unfortunately, this claim has a bad habit of bleeding over to other “more professional” forms of communication.

Clarity is Key

In the end, clarity is really what matters. Always ask yourself the following question – “How can I make my message more clear to my audience?” If you want to connect with a younger audience using slang or abbreviations that would be familiar to them, do so. But if you are addressing a group of professionals (like a panel of doctors) with an email beginning with “OMG. You haz to give dis offer some thought 4 sure. LOL :) LOL :),” you might not be all that appealing.

As the Huffington Post shows us, grammatical errors are easy to make, and pervade every form of communication. But there are times when even the simplest of errors can cost your business money. Poor grammar implies a lack of professionalism, can make website visitors suspect a scam, and can turn investors and advertisers off. So please, take the time to consider grammar in your business before it becomes a serious problem. And be absolutely sure that your purposely poor grammar isn’t insulting. After all, not all of us can “think different” about business grammar “everyday,” and still expect our rightfully earned share of the “pirates plunder.”

Tagged as: article writing, blogging, Business Writing, grammar, spelling errors

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Article by Mitch O'Conner

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