Credibility Thieves in Your Copy: Improper Grammar and Punctuation
July 2nd, 2007 Dina at Wordfeeder.comBack in April of this year, I published an article called Bad Copy, Good Copy: A Show-By-Example Guide to Writing Stronger Web Content.
Next, I invited my readers to contribute to a discussion on my marketing blog, Blogfeeder - Grammatical Pet Peeves. The topic was inspired by foolhardy bloggers who can’t or won’t take the time to proofread, spell check, and/or consult with the nearest linguistic expert, thereby desecrating the language and making themselves look foolish in the process.
Now, don’t get me wrong - the mood of the blogosphere is somewhat casual and free. No one is going to come down on you terribly hard if you stick a hyphen where an em-dash is supposed to go, or speak in phrases instead of full sentences on occasion. But even so - every now and then it’s wise to take a quickie refresher course on How Not to Look Silly in Your Business Communication. In other words: mind your grammatical p’s and q’s.
Thanks to all who took the time to enliven our grammar conversation with their remarks!
Here are 9 Grammatical Goofs as contributed by my very astute readers - and a somewhat detailed lesson on each.
Overabundance of exclamation points
Me, myself and I
It’s and its
Lose and loose
Spaces after punctuation
Capitalization craze
Hyphenation horrors
To, too, and two
Dangling or misplaced modifiers
To read the entire article, visit Credibility Thieves in Your Copy: Grammar Goofs and Punctuation Flubs
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Email Dina@Wordfeeder.com for a copywriting or website marketing quote today.
July 3rd, 2007 at 9:06 pm
“I realize that for some people who write web content, English is actually a second language. And kudos to them for being able to communicate in more than one tongue. But let me ask you: if you don’t know English enough to realize that you need a space after punctuation, what the heck are you doing publishing business websites and pretending to come off as a professional? Burns my brisket, it does.”
For God’s sake! English is a second language for me and it burns me more than that to see far worse errors in sites written by illiterates whose primary language IS English.