Comet Branding - Branding | PR | Social Media

Where have all the vowels gone? 6 tips to ensure your writing doesn't embarrass you.

Srsly ppl. Whts hppnd 2 r wrd sklz L8LY?

Have you ever read the book C D B by William Steig? It’s a classic. Written in 1968, it should be required reading – or better yet – the user manual for today’s online language experience.

It’s clear why we use the shortcuts we do within certain forms of communication. Text messages on standard mobile phones can be a pain in the butt to type out in full. Tweets must be 140 characters or less. Shorter is faster and faster is good, right? Hmmm. Not sure about that. Just because we can get our point across with fewer letters doesn’t necessarily mean we should.

All joking aside, what are we doing to the future of writing skills? What does it mean to our children and our children’s children to have only ever worked in a world where spellcheck is the final arbiter of what is good and write in our language? Get it? Write vs. right? Ha.

I was fortunate to have had incredibly strict and brilliant English/writing teachers in both grade school and high school. Nothing slipped past them. We learned how to graph sentences, memorized a song to remember every preposition in the English language (to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy),  and were taught how to tell the difference between a subject (I) and an object (me) and how to use each correctly. What’s a gerund? I can tell you. But then I’d have to kill you.

In fact, we were not granted permission to use the bathroom in first grade unless we asked correctly. “Of course you can,” our teacher would respond. “All of us ARE ABLE. But you do not have my permission until you’ve asked correctly.” “MAY I please use the bathroom?” “Yes, you may.”

Maybe I was just lucky. But I continue to be shocked and disappointed by the prevalence of poor writing and abysmal spelling and grammar that I observe from people in the marketing and communications world. Do they not know any better? Did they simply forget that there are rules and guidelines of which they are in violation? Does it occur to these language abusers that their mistakes make them AND THEIR CLIENTS look sloppy, if not ignorant? Regardless of the reason, I will not hire anyone with errors on a resume. Period.

It’s not just a problem of word shortening or SMS slang; it’s an issue of professionalism. What should be the expectations of professionals who communicate for a living? What you do in your free time is up to you, but if I’m a client or an employer and I’m paying YOU to manage and implement communications programs on my behalf, then I expect it to be equal to or better than what I would do for myself. Translation: error-free.

Everyone makes mistakes and typos. The issue at hand is what we do about it. Here are six ways to avoid diminishing your perceived brilliance with poor writing:

1. If you’re not sure how to spell something, look it up. Dictionary.com could not be easier to use. Seriously. Don’t rely on spellcheck. There are many times where you’ve spelled a word correctly, but it may be a homophone or simply similar enough to be confused for the word you actually intended to use, e.g. hear/here, their/there/they’re, poor/pour/pore.

2. Have someone else read what you’ve written before you publish it or hit SEND. Your choice of words may make perfect sense to you, but a new set of eyes may be able to identify thoughts and phrases that are unclear, as well as typos and mistakes. If you are all alone in this world and have no one to read your work, then see #3, below.

3. Read what you’ve written at least once before calling it a day. All of it. You might be amazed at what you find. Then read it backwards. Proofing your own work is difficult because it is familiar. If you read it backwards, you can trick your mind out of automatically filling in the blanks and skipping over incorrect words and phrases.

4. Don’t use an apostrophe unless you are using a contraction or indicating possession. Ever. Those are the two things apostrophes are for. Not for plurals. Ex. “orange’s $.10″ I ask myself how an orange came to possess ten cents. Drop the apostrophe and we’re in business.

5. Speaking of contractions… I’m using them all over the place in this post. I’m using them conversationally, informally and definitely sarcastically. Generally speaking, don’t use contractions in formal writing. It detracts from your tone.

6. Read your work. I know I already said this. After reading this entire post twice, I decided to include it twice. Know why? Because I found some errors.

There are so many other things we can all do to ensure our writing is as good as it should be. Laziness should not be the cause for a black mark against you. If what you wrote is truly good quality, then how you wrote it should not detract from it. We could all stand to benefit from going back to the basics. C D B? S. I C D B, 10-Q.

I am now stepping down from my soap box. Thanks for listening.