Poor Spelling Might Seem Like a Little Thing.

When we have something to say…to teach…to explain…to ‘whatever’, we would like our words to be taken seriously.  After all, we frequently spend quite a bit of time collecting information, uploading pictures, and linking our site to other sites for more ‘viewer availability’.  Why, then,  would we now want our readers to read just a paragraph or two of our article and then stop…and leave!?

When we post an article or a picture on a website but excuse our grammatical errors and poor spelling with the attitude of “I’ve never been very good at that but people will overlook my deficiencies because…”,  we are simply deluding ourselves.  Yes, an occasional error or typo is forgiven even by publishers but if your article contains a lot of errors, this simply demonstrates to your peers that :

1.  You don’t care very much about how your article looks to others.  This is not a good thing since your article is the ‘bait’ with the reader being the ‘fish’: the more appealing the bait, the more bites it will get!  (In this case, stinky bait doesn’t work very well).

2.  You just don’t pay attention to what it is you read or write.  (Otherwise, you might have an idea of where to put that pesky period!).  This is definitely not a good image to portray when you want others to pay attention to the information you so painstakingly put together!  You can’t ask us to do something that you’re not willing to do, yourself!  (Unless its’ killing spiders in which I’ll pay you fifty dollars to…).

3.  You don’t care if anyone reads your article or not.  Well, this may indeed be true…but if writing is simply a personal therapy of sorts for you,  why post your conglamoration of grammatical mishaps on a writers’ site?  (Ow!  My eyes!!  My eyes!!).  Why not just create a personal blog somewhere where you can go and “write” to your heart’s content?  Or better yet, just start keeping a diary!

4.  You don’t like to proofread!  Well, you certainly have proven this one to me!  The way eech sentense runs into the next one without so much as an period placed here or there to ennable the reader to catch his breathe seems like such a marathan rase to the finish line where all this time-consuming typping can finally end because now I have created the LONGEST AND MOST POORLY SPELLED SENTENCE IN THE WORLD and can finaly stop to go watch tv instead of proofreading this stuf which is so time-consumming that if someone is really intrested in what I have to say, they’ll jist read this and if they dont, they jist weren’t intrested in what it was I was writting about anyways.

Okay…be honest;  if you knew that a certain writer’s work looked very much like the example given in #4 above,  how often would you truly visit this site in order to read its’ articles?  (Now please remember that I’m not talking about best friends supporting best friends, no matter what…nor am I talking about a cult following….).

And last but by no means least; 

5.  English is not your primary language!   Very excusable if you are from Japan, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, Italy, France, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Ireland, Scotland, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Korea, Afghanistan, Africa, Egypt, Israel, Pakistan, Romania,…okay, I’ve made my point!

BUT IF YOU’VE BEEN BORN AND RAISED IN NEW JERSEY…(or anywhere else in an english-speaking country) then you really have no GOOD excuse in allowing your articles to remain shoddily written!  (Having repeatedly fallen asleep in English class is not a good excuse!).

A very inexpensive way to almost instantly improve your article’s appearance is to have a friend or family member read what you have finished writing!  Proofreading is as necessary to an article’s presentation as air is to breathing!  Sometimes all you need is just a “new pair of eyes” for a few moments in order to spot the areas that need attention and improvement.  There’s nobody around for you to ask?  Well, don’t let that stop you!   Just stand up, stretch, yawn, get something to drink, and then come back and read your material again.  Everything will seem ‘fresher’ and ‘newer’ to you now…and mistakes will stand out from the crowd better!

Don’t have a spellcheck program available to you?  Buy a dictionary!  Sure, it’s old fashioned and time-consuming but better to spend a minute correcting a misspelled word or two…or five…rather than losing viewers because you wanted to be lazy BEFORE your article was finished.

Read, read, and then read some more!  Read newspapers, magazines, advertisements, books, street signs, bumper stickers, and anything else with words on it!  The more you read, the better you will spell!

Also, the more you read, the better you will understand sentence structure.  Don’t know a pronoun from an adjective?  Well, don’t worry about being able to put a name to the words that you are using.  Just pay attention to the things that you read such as ” is the color of something placed before or after that something in a sentence?”  “Why did the writer make a new paragraph here?”  “Why was that word capitalized but not this one?”  “What on God’s green earth does THIS word mean?  Was the author trying to prove how smart he is?”  etc., etc., etc. 

When something is worth doing, it should be worth doing well!  (Now where did I hear THAT before?…oh, yeah…a voice from my childhood years still whispers in my ear every now and then.  Schizophrenia?  I hope not!).   If a subject interests you, then surely there will be at least five other people who would like to read about it!  (Yes, I am forever an optimist!).

Remember that, as writers, we live in the Land of Words so make your words worth reading and remembering.

Who knows…if enough of us remember you, you’ll end up being famous!!