I’m sure you wouldn’t have to look too hard to find enough writing errors in my Blog to sink a small fishing boat…so I’m riding shotgun on this one while my girlfriend (who’s an English teacher) gives me some advice. In her opinion, obvious errors in an article are as distracting as a really ugly font or a bad color scheme. Here is her top ten list of easily corrected writing errors.
- Spelling. It might sound obvious but you’d be surprised how many people let their enthusiasm for posting overwhelm the necessity of a decent spell check.
- Punctuation. As glaringly obvious as this point may be, if you’re distracted by what you’re writing and forget to check your work over, full stops and commas are the first things to fall off the back of the article. If you don’t have the correct punctuation the sense of your writing can be affected. Have you heard the story about the Panda who eats, shoots and leaves? Did the Panda have a nice meal of bamboo foliage, or did it consume its food, kill the waiter and run away? It’s all about putting the right punctuation in the right place.
- Apostrophes. These deserve their own bullet point. Here’s a really basic list of rules.
- Use an apostrophe if the word is a contraction. (If it’s made smaller by taking out some letters, the apostrophe stands in for the missing letters) E.g. Can not becomes can’t.
- Use an apostrophe to show possession. E.g. The cat’s toys. (The toys belong to the cat) If there are multiple cats then you have to shift the apostrophe to the other side of the ’s’. So it would read: The cats’ toys.
- NEVER use an apostrophe to show plural. E.g. Apple’s for sale should actually read Apples for sale. NO apostrophe.
- Apostrophes should not be used with possessive pronouns because possessive pronouns already show possession – they don’t need an apostrophe. His, her, its, my, yours, ours are all possessive pronouns.”
- Slang. As tempting as it is to write as you speak, even with the idea of appealing to a certain audience, slang is clunky to read, tends to reduce your assumed authority on a topic and may alienate more people than it attracts on the basis that they have no idea what you’re talking about.
- Followed swiftly by the dreaded text (txt) language. Lts of ppl cnt rd dat txt lang, cos its 2 abv.
- Circumlocution. The word that I have aforementioned is a term that is not commonly used and in fact, not generally known by many people but it serves to define a regularly occurring phenomenon in blog writing that has the tendency to detract from good ideas and genuinely favorable writing by filling the readers receptors with an overwhelming and therefore unacceptable amount of words. Or…Circumlocution: the use of more words than necessary to express an idea.
- Tense. Are you writing your article in the present, past or future? Any of them are fine, but make sure you pick one and stick with it.
- Sense. This might seem like silly advice to give to anyone over the age of 12, but you need to make sure that what you have written, from the individual sentences to the bigger paragraphs actually makes sense. Read it out loud…sometimes your eyes will miss it but it will usually sound wrong to your ears if you’ve messed up somewhere.
- Use features like CAPITALS, italics and bold effectively. They are brilliant to provide emphasis but if you are too liberal with them then they lose their impact.
- Nobody ever said formal or correct writing couldn’t be funny, clever or individual. These common mistakes distract your reader but correcting them shouldn’t mean that you sacrifice your style. If you clean up the minor errors in your writing then it means that what you’re actually saying will become more attractive to read.
Lillie Ammann
These excellent tips cover many of the common errors I see regularly – not just in blogs, but also in manuscripts and business documents I edit.
The irony of the grammatically incorrect title emphasizes your point.
Maurice (TheCaymanHost)
Whether it was irony or a deliberate set up, if your English teacher really checked that title, give her a hundred lines and detention
Good post and your title does actually illustrate very typical errors that are seen every day online. Although I may be guilty of mangling the King’s English from time to time, I do wish some people would try harder, particularly those who claim to be “writers” and then go on to demonstrate very poor ability at even a basic level. Ouch.
Simon
I just wanted to make a comment to say the the title of this article was well and truly written poorly to emphasize the point. I am glad that people have found it a useful resource.
Lisa
Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but there’s an error in punctuation in the Punctuation paragraph.
That just cracks me up.
The panda did not eat IT IS food. It’s = it is.
You meant to say the panda eats ITS food.
Out of all errors on blogs, that must be my biggest pet peeve. And the fact that it showed up, even here, just shows how easy it is to miss things in proofreading. Maybe “it’s” needs its own bullet point under the apostrophe section!
I love the points made here, however! Very, very good ones.
Lisa
Bloggrrl
Heh. Love the headline. I’m totally guilty of #4. I’ve wondered if I alienate people from other cultures, but so far, no. I’m having too much fun to worry about it right now, at any rate. These are good tips, though.
Simon
@ Lisa – Thanks for the correction and good spotting. In our attempt to simplify the use of the apostrophe we messed up our example. The rule which we messed up was “Apostrophes should not be used with possessive pronouns because possessive pronouns already show possession – they don’t need an apostrophe. His, her, its, my, yours, ours are all possessive pronouns.” I am adding this to the list.
Today Is Not Over Yet
Hey! thanks for visiting Zuggu, it on beta and not yet finished by I really appreciate your cooperation adding your articles and I hope it helps you with the traffic to your wonderful blog!
Simon
@Today Is Not Over Yet – I am always interested in social media sites!
smack
Simon, about your comment:
“I just wanted to make a comment to say the the title of this article was well and truly written poorly to emphasize the point. I am glad that people have found it a useful resource.”
This displays the same type of error as the title. ‘well and truly X’ is the idiom, not ‘well and truly adverb x’ or ‘x adverb’.
I am not impressed.
frogwalloper
“If you don’t have the correct punctuation the sense of your writing can be effected.”
And if you use the verb ‘effect’ when you mean ‘affect’, that’s going to screw things up too!
Simon
Thanks for the correction Frogwalloper, this article has been read over 1500 times and you were the first to spot that mistake. Smack, the poor grammar in the comments is my fault, not the author of this article. I guess this sort of article is asking to be picked over in such ways. Thanks for visiting though!
web design new york
Interesting read! Great blog keep up the good work
Mattheous
Thanks for this post! It’s a good refresher for all of us, including me.
But never forget: we all make mistakes.
Matt
wow, great tips indeed. I feel like writing is very iimportant for the success of blogs, please find this blog, where the writing tips and tricks are shared by the blogger.
Good Writing
Chauncy
U d0nt w4n7 us p0s71ng 0f th4′ 514ng1zzl13 or 1337n355? 5h1zn17, 1m 5urpr153d!
(You don’t want us posting slang or text speak? S***, I’m surprised!”
Computer Science Thesis
Great post. Very informative for all the writers and for the aspiring ones. This can be a review for them.
A big help for the bloggers and web copywriters.
I really like the number two tip part.
Real Estate Chick
I am with you on the spelling part my friend, I am horrible at it, thank god for spell check tools, heck I am even spell checking this comment.
But seriously, these are some great tips for bloggers. If I visit a site with to much slang and so forth, I leave quicker than I got there, can’t stand it. If you are going to run a website or blog, I think you should work hard at making it look professional, unless of course its just a personal blog for you and your buddies or something.
Tks 4 the tisp <—Joke!
chetan
Spell checking is very essential for the blogs that are new. If you spell words wrong it will surely affect your readers count. However I don’t mean to say that all the big blogs have 100% right spellings and no mistakes. There are many examples for this.
justin from brett favre saga
I love the title. Less Good. # 2 and 7 get me a lot. I seem to have a hard time figuring out where commas should go and I tend to think too far ahead as I am writing so my tenses are messy a lot of the time. I am amazed when I proof read my posts.
I am a half decent speller and that has improved since Firefox started doing spell check for me
alex from annual free credit report
Haha very well said. Especially about the Panda that ended up shooting the waiter? Classic example of a punctuation mistake!
James
Takes you back to basics. I wholeheartedly agree with this. I would also like to point out one additional thing I notice. Incorrect use of paragraphs can be very common. Nothing drives me crazier than reading an article that is written with bad sentence structure.
Kevin from Web hosting Ireland.
Great post. Number 10 is so true. Some of the best blogs with huge traffic are clever and funny.
One of my favorite blogs is written by a writer from a newspaper in florida. He talks about his daily life and makes fun of himself.
ian from small hosting
I really don’t think that writing error is important. Content is more important than thinking about spelling error. Although I usually check my spelling using Google toolbar. I search the phrase, and Google will show me if I am wrong.
Jason from list your home
ian, there are so many blogs out there and you want to do everything you can to convince people yours is worth reading. I don’t mind a bit of error but posts that constantly have bad grammer and spelling bug me a bit, maybe it’s just me.
I don’t think that spelling is going to make or break your blog but it reflects on your professionalism and bad spelling can look like laziness.
kouji from haiku poems examples
text language for me is pretty bad. i really don’t like having to decipher what i’m reading.
Make your blog posts look more professional
Hi, these are real good tips. Into them, I would like to add mine few: One of the base things that determines how goodlooking a blog is the title of it. as you well know, a person can easily make the title look bad by either making it all caps or not properly capitalized. In that post mentioned, I have given some guidelines to make them better blog posts.
Justin from Adventure Blog
Unfortunately, I have caught myself doing some of these things from time to time. My biggest problem is using the wrong “instances” of words like there instead of their. Ugh
Busby SEO Test Blog
Typo in writing is human. Sometimes I found a blog that written in a well structured formal way. But it made me think that it was written just for adsense.
Nate from Eden Prairie Real Estate
Great article. Proof reading definitely takes time but obviously very necessary. It is amazing to see the high number of basic mistakes made on most blogs. Writing is a skill and requires constant practice!
tony from Domain registration pay pal.
Great article. Spelling errors used to be a easy way to pick up some free traffic but search engines now correct listings for most. Slang might be the new way people try to get more traffic and use it to get listed higher in SERP. I like to read post over a few times to see if it is correct and makes sense to myself before i publish it.
Mel from pret hypotheque
A very catchy blog.. See the comments you’re gettin’ Simon? .. =)
Hey! Nobody’s perfect.. Just keep on writing!
Mathew from Hsbc online banking.
Nice post. I see people use slang and miss spell all the time. Some people find site because of this and others find it hard to read.
James from fashion women dresses
When I see writing errors in blogs, it makes me feel that the writer doesn’t take the effort the make it a good read. It makes the blog looks unprofessional. Not a good idea. Thanks for the post.
Theo from Website laten maken
It is hard to avoid txt language these days. For many abbrevations I don’t even know whether it is txt of a REAL abbrevation! But writing out in full will never hurt your blog, so I guess that would be the way to go..
Jake from How to make extra money
Hey, less good isn’t grammatically corec-oh. I get it now.
Perez hilton has to be the worst writer ever and he’s got arguably the largest blog out there.
andy from Gold double long etf
Good post. People hate it when they can not understand what your trying to say. Most people will just move on unless you describe what you talking about in a way they understand. Spelling makes a difference so does structure.
andy from freemoney
Funny how search has changed. People used to use misspelled words and slang now search engines correct listings or show sites with correct spelling.
tom from Cheapest dsl
I think slang would not be good. Most peope do not want to read slang on a site. They want to understand what your talking about.
Mexabet from Quality web directory
I have a web/article directory and I see these errors you treated everyday. Sometimes I correct the mistakes (when I’m in the mood). But on other occasions I just delete the badly-written articles and move on to the next one.
Researchpaper
well as far as i concern i really think to use misspelled words and slang now search engines correct listings or show sites with correct spelling.
Joe from Diet Blog
AH! So many people should read this article. You should ad buttons to the bottom of your posts to digg, stumble, etc your content. I think this article is great and want to share it, but as it stands, I’m a lazy lazy man. Just kidding. I’ll e-mail this to a bunch of my blogging friends. A lot of people need this reminder.
Lee from Education
I am embarassed to say that I have learned a lot from this post. There are a lot of things that I have always been curious about but never bothered looking them up.
marry from datingservices
This is very true. If people can not undertsnad your site they just leave. Slang or bad spelling will trun alot of people off and they will leave. If you have to work to figure out what site says they would rather try another website and all your hard work to get them to your site is waisted.
Dave from Free PS3
Good advice there. The two things that bother me the most are ALL CAPS (try reading Kanye’s blog, I want to gouge my eyes out), and the whole their vs they’re vs there.
Roxanne from Gliiter art supplies
Thanks for the list of writing errors. I hope I can avoid the same mistakes with my blogs.
jack from exon mobil stock
I think the slang hurts the most. If people can not understand site they just leave. I do not think much slang is a good keyword term either.
Laurence from assurance hypothécaire
This is a very good post you got here. Very informative. Now I know what to work on in order to improve my blogging skills. I’ll keep your tips in mind. Thanks a lot.
Nicole Foster from Web Design and Development Blog
Having grammatically correct blog articles are very important. As an obsessive perfectionist, I often freak out if a blog article has too many mistakes. I also try my best to spell and punctuate correctly. I freak out if I don’t!
I’ll keep your tips in mind when I make another article.
AskTheCoders from Coding Help
I have to say I disagree with #9. I find capitals, italics, and bolding to be very useful. It is important to catch a readers eye, especially in an environment where more people are skimming webpages or blogs than reading the whole thing.
rick from 32 lcd tv
Great post takes me back to school days. Spelling and slang will turn most people off and you can loose trasffic and sales from this. If it is hard to understand people will not like your site.