Many people will tell you that the message is more important than spelling or grammar – and it is, but only to a point. A great message is lost if the spelling and grammar are poor.

Last night, I saw a page on a website that shows how important spelling can be – as even one wrong letter can make a big difference.

We make real-estate CD’s. [Business] can also make and host your web site, with promotion as the key fucus.

Using a u instead of an o is not just a typo we can ignore – the new word is too close to another word and that is what now catches our attention – not the original message.

It also changed the reader’s interpretation of the ‘presenting in a unique way’ in the following sentence, creating giggles instead of interest in their professional services.

It comes back to proofreading your work – not just a quick glance or use of a spell check, but a genuine check of what you have written. And the best proof reading is done a day or so after the writing or by another person. The quality of your content will improve through this simple process and maintaining a ‘focus’.

The fabulous Gundagai Pharmacy

All the other signs were aimed at travellers who could well need a break and/or some food so those services had the potential to attract people off the highway. But how many people doing along drive suddenly think “Oh yes, I must visit that pharmacy!”

Sure, the occasional driver will pass with a headache or other minor ailment and will want a pharmacy – even then, they will probably look for a pharmacy near something else that is worth stopping for.

I’m sure the pharmacy could have found a more effective (although perhaps less public) use of their marketing dollars. Or at least put something on their sign aimed at travellers.

This is a really simple example of how you need to understand the audience you are appealing to if you want a successful outcome. Sometimes exposure to a larger audience is tempting but a smaller, interested audience will generally bring in more clients.

Would you pull into a town because they claim to have a great pharmacy?

In other words, not one ingredient was listed – some were explained in the recipe itself but most didn’t have quantities listed and ‘dry ingredients’ could include a few things!

So learn from their mistake and check you always include all the important details – then check again as part of your proof reading!

Doesn’t give a good impression of that blog or writer does it? Every time you write something that goes public, it affects how people view you – yet some people just don’t seem to get that. What’s worse is that this was a guest post on another blog so I assume they didn’t review it before accepting it. Silly as I closed the site after this post, and the rest may be great for all I’ll ever know…

I started reading the post in good faith but the poor expression made me skim the second half rather than read it which is never a good sign. I honestly only kept reading because I hoped the content would improve and justify it’s existence on a site I was reviewing. It didn’t.

Although appearing to be an article giving information, it was a poorly disguised ad for why company X is a good choice for design work – namely because they are young designers. I commented back as I don’t believe all young designers are good, nor all experienced designers lack passion.

Had I been given that article to edit or at least comment on, my suggestions for this article would have been:

• make sure it all flows and that each sentence make sense
• give balanced information (eg “while an older designer has experience, remember that new designers are keen to impress and may be passionate about their work” or “new designers have a lot to offer and you may find they charge less to get experience”)
• introduce any specifics in the article, not just the heading (in this case the heading mentions web design but the article starts with ‘designing is a creative field’ - designing is more than websites)
• use good grammar and punctuation (“give you the brand image as promised because; they want to earn a good name” does not need any punctuation in the middle and certainly not a semi-colon)

Just as I was leaving the page, I noticed the writer’s bio and sighed again. Nearly every word started with a capital letter (which is so annoying and completely unnecessary) and he claimed to be a ‘professional content writer’. With that example of his writing skills, he is not making a good impression for himself or the web design company paying him to write this article.

How do you respond to such poor examples of work?

“already been attended to by phone or other means would you please advise YES/NO”

How does it help them to know I will (or won’t) advise them on whether my issue has already been dealt with? Wouldn’t the better question be ” Have you already told us about this issue? YES/NO”

Whenever you give people a choice of answers in a survey or form, you have to give answers that actually give the information you are after. Remember that the words ‘would you’ are what people will try to answer, so put them at the start of your question or don’t use them at all.

Generally, use active verbs and phrase questions as simply as possible to avoid confusion and misunderstandings.

PS I could go on to say how important it is to get your promotional materials right – and not use old materials after you make changes. My original complaint was about their promotional brochure offering 4 things in a set but their website offering two things for the same price. Putting these two issues together has totally destroyed that company’s credibility and I don’t trust a thing they say now – and won’t be returning there.

It is much harder to excuse a document or website that makes the same mistake more than once. I came across this sentence a little while ago:

“Informing you super fund of a change of address is just as important as informing you bank.”

Using you instead of your is one of those things done easily enough (spell check won’t pick you as wrong) but really annoys me. Seeing it twice in that sentence just tells me the writer doesn’t understand the difference between you and your or just doesn’t care about being professional or making a good impression.

Two errors in that sentence would also make me less forgiving of other mistakes in the same document so it goes further than two missing letters.

In this case, the email was from someone who can apparently improve my email marketing – how can I trust that claim when their email is so poor itself?

So here are the main issues and the corresponding lessons to be learned:

• subject “Meeting request for Tash” email opening “Hi, well…”
  lesson – if you can put my name in the subject, how hard would it be to address the email to me too? Names are important, and beyond getting my attention in the subject
• opening sentence “Well I hope this note finds you well”
  lessons – using well twice in such a short sentence looks wrong and lazy, and the opening well doesn’t really fit there anyway; it is an email not a note
• “I know you place tremendous value on your time, so I’ve included an overview of what we do”
  lesson – you may assume or expect it but  you know anything about me; why give me an overview when I don’t even know who you are? Perhaps “so I will introduce myself quickly” or just “so I will be brief”
• “in-house data append… we would run append test and get back to you with the appended fields”
  what does data append mean (no, not a facetious question as I really don’t know and this email doesn’t even give me enough clues to guess!) Pretty obvious lesson – don’t use jargon or terms the reader may not know, or at least define them!
• “If you are looking at adding value to your investment and get more revenue…”
  what investment are we talking about? Do you mean adding value to my business, my brand, my marketing, or something else? Lesson – be clear and finish with something relevant to the entire message
  lesson – use good grammar when doing a cold call like this. ‘If you are looking at… get more revenue’ does not read well – no complicated grammar there!
• “Send us a 50 -100 records from your database…”
  Does this mean now or after we sign up for your service? Do I have any assurances how you will use that data – I care about the privacy of my subscribers. And more grammar issues (“a records” just grates!)
• Listed fields they include (which I don’t think is very relevant in a first call email but anyway) has ‘zip code’ which I don’t like – either they are emailing me from the US or they have copied a US email and are too lazy to localise it. Lesson – if in Australia, use Australian terminology, and likewise for any other grouping of people
• The email includes her name, her job title and the name of a business (presumably the one she is emailing about but she never actually mentions them in the email!) so I don’t know where she is from and a .com email address again gives me no assurance she is Australian.
  lesson – provide contact details and enough information for the reader to know how relevant your message is for them. Knowing where she is from affects things like currency (not such an issue while the AUD and USD are so close), time zones for support, spam and privacy laws and also how relevant her data acquisition would be
• under her signature is one line “To stop receiving our newsletters, reply back with STOP in the subject line”
  lesson – anti-spam laws at their minimum but surely an email company can have an automated unsubscribe system? What is worse, however, is the thought that I may get newsletters from these people when I never asked for it and certainly don’t want it after this email! If she has subscribed me as well as emailed me, I would be tempted to report her for spamming.

How would you respond to getting such an email? Would you just delete it as spam anyway, send a terse ‘no thanks’ or would you ignore all these issues if the service itself was of interest?

The question was in effect “Are you primarily a business or personal customer of these services?”

The answer options were “personal/business/equal/I am no longer a customer of Company X”

So the anonymous-to-get-unbiased-answers aspect was thrown out the window with that answer which is not so good. It also didn’t mean a lot as I never said I had been a Company X customer, nor even acknowledged I’d heard of company X before. The fourth answer didn’t even answer the question so was completely irrelevant.

The lesson is to read every answer with the question before you finalise a survey or any other multiple choice list – this also applies for a bulleted list in that each point must complete a sentence from the introduction.

From the above example…

“Are you primarily a business or personal customer of these services?” “personal” works
“Are you primarily a business or personal customer of these services?” “no longer a customer of Company X” doesn’t work.

If you are writing or editing a survey, ensure you read each answer with the question in this way to get a polished, sensible result.

“CD wants you to read the blog post {URL}”

Believe it or not, these rude requests have recently entered my blog comment and email box. Do they really think it will result in me clicking on their link? I certainly didn’t, and I deleted their comment/email as well.

It really annoys me when people are rude, but more so when people expect me to react because they have chosen to do something.

So what if you have read my blog post? That doesn’t mean I automatically have an interest in what you blog about, yet a number of people have this expectation; even worse are those associates/friends who expect me to read their blog regularly just because I know them, even if there is no sign they have EVER read any of my blog posts!

It’s like those people (not clients) who get annoyed because I don’t return their phone call straight away – it may suit them to call during the day but I have a business to run!

Not a very constructive blog post I admit, but there is some relief to vent about rudeness and expectations! Of course, we can all take the message that a polite request is much more likely to get someone to do what you want (in this case, read your blog post!)

I find it really annoying when the ideas don’t flow in a piece of writing – the change of topics or tense or perception may not seem major but if it makes me have to reread something to understand what happened, I tend to loose interest in the whole thing.

I came across the following example of this on a website where it is promoting cheap ‘reports’ to help small business people; the errors give me the impression of low quality pdfs rather than informative reports – what do you think from their description?

Too often I visit the site of a business mum to find there is only a contact form! The main reason I visit the site is to see where they are located as, where possible, I prefer supporting local business mums. There are a lot of different reasons for the lack of contact details.

This weeks *** report will look at five different contact methods you may want to put on you site as well as options for phone numbers, fax numbers, postal address and email address.

Yes, there are various reasons for not including contact details but how is that relevant when you are telling me how annoyed you were at not seeing any contact details! It also has no relevance to the next paragraph so makes the whole thing very disjointed.

I suspect they are attempting to not offend people without contact details rather than standing strong with their own argument. However, it has backfired with poor writing and an indication of weakness that detracts from their ‘expert’ stand in the report.

Here’s an alternative version that won’t offend, sound weak or be hard to read*:

Too often I visit the site of a business mum to find there is only a contact form! I understand they may have their own reason for not including contact details, but the main reason I visit the site is to see where they are located as, where possible, I prefer supporting local business mums.

This weeks *** report will look at five different contact methods you may want to put on your site, as well as some low-risk options for showing phone numbers, fax numbers, postal address and email address.

Having said poor flow of ideas is distracting, my next blog post will include some tips on how to maintain the flow…

*My changes are in blue to improve the flow plus some necessary improvements to the second paragraph so it makes sense. I didn’t totally rewrite it as I would for myself or a client!