A lot of people these days have forgotten the importance of writing.
We get it. Sometimes it’s just easier to type with “txt speech” and “Internet lingo”. After all, “btw” and “lol” save a lot more keystrokes than “by the way” and “laughing out loud”. We’re not saying you need to stop using those shortcuts altogether, but there’s a reason they should be kept to personal and casual conversations. It’s just not professional.
We all knew that, right?
But there’s so much more to writing than just skipping the abbreviations and typing it all out. Having fully formed words and sentences alone is not what makes writing good. Sometimes, it’s not even enough to make writing acceptable.
When it comes to writing, just one mistake can be the smoking gun pointing out that whoever wrote the text in question doesn’t actually know what they’re doing. Those “tiny” mistakes can be some of the biggest writing blunders—the errors that pull your reader away from the material and make them go, “Wait a minute, that’s wrong!”
Some examples: “must of” wrongly used in the place of “must have,” the wrong “your/you’re” or “to/too,” a misplaced or missing punctuation mark, a typo… the list goes on.
And while a mistake like that here or there may seem “small,” it all comes back to the importance of writing: good writing keeps your audience engaged and wanting more. Bad writing points out inexperience and lack of quality. Those errors that break your reader’s engagement and pull them back to reality also indicate a lack of quality, however “small” they may seem.
That’s right. Joe Smith noticed those misplaced commas and that typo in a product’s description. One thing led to another, and suddenly he was questioning the quality of the entire brand. There went that sale.
No, that’s not an exaggeration. That’s the impact of writing.
Keep in mind that words and writing are the building blocks of communication. If you have even one block out of place, suddenly the whole structure can come toppling down. So if you want to communicate and build meaningful relationships with your audience, you should have a masterful hold of these foundations.
Of course, it’s not always a grammar mistake or a typo that breaks engagement, either. Just choosing to use one word over a synonym can make someone turn away. A product description, blog post, or press release that isn’t immediately interesting or that doesn’t read well can just as easily break audience engagement. Writing that doesn’t do a good job of capturing the voice of your brand or company can lead to a disjointed public image, which can turn people away, too.
And sure, a bit of misplaced punctuation, and one disjointed blog post may not always lead to a loss of engagement on its own, it certainly will if it starts piling up—which will happen if your content isn’t being produced by someone who understands the importance of writing and who has a good grasp on how to do it well.
It’s a skill, and not everyone has it. Just like anything else, it takes time and effort to learn how to do it well, but it’s well worth it. At the end of the day, the biggest writing blunders are the ones that make people turn away—and with writing, there are so many ways to mess up and end up doing just that.
So take the time, hit the books, and learn how to do it well. Triple check every comma and semicolon, make sure you know you’re using the right words in the right places, hit the spell check button a few dozen times.
Or come to us… we’re more than happy to do all that for you.