It's Grill Season! (If It Would Ever Stop Snowing, That Is)
Yesterday my husband and I were at Home Depot looking to purchase a gas grill with our tax refund.
Like many modern consumers, we were looking at grills in person, then using our phones to go on the web and read reviews of those grills from people who already own them.
At one point, I wandered off with our two-year-old, who was eager to look at the "fires" (flowers) in the garden department. Meanwhile my husband stayed with the grills and his 4G phone.
When we came back, I asked what he thought of a particular grill. He loved it. "The reviews were great," he said. "There were one or two bad reviews, but I ignored them, because they were so full of typos and bad grammar that it was, like, you can't take them seriously," he said.
No Grammar = No Cred
I'm sure the hubs wasn't intending to give me blog material. But I had to pounce on this one.
When you read something online, and it's riddled with abuses of the English language (glaring errors in grammar, atrocious spelling, total ignorance of punctuation, etc.), does it cause you to take the writer's ideas less seriously?
For me, the answer is: Yes. But it depends on HOW bad the abuses are. A typo here or there doesn't bother me, especially on a friend's blog or other nonprofessional piece of content. Professional publications, however, should be editing what they publish.
And we've all seen those extreme examples. Some individual writes a product review, or comments on a news story, and their text has more mistakes than an alley cat has fleas. It's hard to take somebody seriously as a communicator when they pay so little attention to how they communicate. Subconsciously, I've even gone one step further and found myself forming an opinion of a writer's intelligence. I admit it. It's hard not to, when you can't even make it through what they wrote without pausing every other word to wonder what they actually meant to say.
It's the same with professional publications. If I'm reading a news story or other informational piece online, and it has obviously not been edited at all, my eyes flicker up to the domain name and the company logo. I'm likely to take the entire website/company less seriously. I'm even likely to avoid that website in the future because I consider it to be less trustworthy.
It's Not About the Mistake(s)
I always say, with grammar and spelling errors, it's almost never about the mistake itself. It's about how the mistake makes you look: rushed, uneducated, careless.
I realized that, as an editor, I may be more likely than most people to take error-riddled online content less seriously. What do YOU think?
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