Typos

Everybody makes typos! Unless you are a major corporation with multi-level staffing where a site gets checked over multiple times by different individuals before going live, you are GOING to have typos! But there IS a limit!

When more than one word per paragraph is misspelled, when there are combinations of misspellings and grammatical errors, and when sentence structure and punctuation are jumbled, it makes reading the content and focusing on it very difficult.

Good spelling, grammar, and punctuation do equate in most people's minds with intelligence, and attention to detail. Those are good qualities in someone from whom you are soliciting service, products, or information.

When the overall content is high quality, and the message is one that the reader wants, they'll happily forgive the odd error. But when the text is riddled with errors, their estimation of your capability is seriously lowered, and the impact of your message is radically altered.

Each time they encounter a visible typo, it will register in their brain for a moment, distracting them from the content temporarily. If this happens three or more times, then it will gain importance, to where it begins to become the focus of the page to them, replacing the actual content as the element of primary focus. Enough typos, and by the end of the page they'll not remember what you had to say, they'll only remember how badly you said it.

You do NOT want them to go away remembering only that you were a bad writer! You want them to remember the substance of your message, whether it be product descriptions, information, service details, or instructions.

Most bad spellers KNOW they are bad spellers (and there are many who are very smart people). If you are one of them, then just make sure that you have someone competent review your text before it goes live. It is not that hard to do, and that extra step will really save you some headaches.

Spell checkers are helpful, but not completely accurate. They miss many spelling errors involving homonyms, and when you use "your" for "you're", or "then" instead of "than". 100% accurate by the spell checker may still be significantly flawed!

Typos are some of those little details that it pays to attend to.

Written by Laura Wheeler