Grammar, you may be surprised to learn, is highly significant. In elementary school, when we learned the difference between a noun and a pronoun, a verb and an adverb, and where they should be used didn’t appear to matter so much.
However, when the written Word strongly influences our decisions, it’s critical to have good grammar.
You may believe that you don’t need to be concerned about it all of the time because it was simply a message to your employer. Right? Grammar is only necessary for your blog, sales copy, and reports, isn’t it?
That viewpoint is no longer correct these days. Whether it’s an email, a message on LinkedIn, or a book, good grammar makes more of a difference than you might think. Here are five reasons why having good grammar could be beneficial to your company.
First Impressions Are Everything
The most important reason to have excellent grammar, regardless of your writing, is critical first impressions. In any commercial connection, it’s essential to demonstrate that your communication is understandable and effective.
It’s the same whether you’re marketing to a general audience or servicing a small number of clients – how you act on the internet will always influence your income.
Consider how much impact your first impression with a potential client may have on your website. Then, if you’ve done SEO properly, the pages, goods, and blog posts on your site should appear in Google searches for certain keywords.
If that’s the case, any page on your website could be your first contact with a client or customer – so start treating it as such when you create new material. For example, before publishing a blog article, product description, or FAQ section, make sure all of them are free of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Otherwise, if you leave out a crucial word or sentence, you may encounter difficulties in the future owing to a misplaced or forgotten comma.
Avoid Miscommunication with Customers
One of the most common issues with bad grammar is that it causes misunderstandings among you and your potential consumers. This is especially true when grammar mistakes exist on a product or service’s webpage. If you don’t make it clear what your customers will be receiving for their money, they won’t stick around.
Some users will continue to visit your website or have decided to stay after finding anything useful or fascinating on another portion of your site. Others will simply proceed to your next competitor’s site.
Don’t expect someone to reach out through your contact information to notify you about an obvious typo or grammatical infelicity; more than likely, you’ve just lost a sale.
Grammar Is Important in ALL Writing
There are, without a doubt, certain situations where grammar is more important than others. For example, Oakhurst Dairy, a Portland-based business, had to shell out over $10 million in compensation for a missing comma in a legal clause. This is because the absence of that single comma changed the sentence’s meaning – technically speaking.
You may easily discover yourself in the situation of having difficulties because of a minor error costing you thousands, whether it’s in a legal document or anywhere else. However, you might also run into problems with something as simple as a difficult-to-understand product description.
Perhaps you copied and pasted the same information for the same product that is available in two different sizes, as an example. As a result, customers may accuse you of misrepresenting the price of your goods or service because you neglected to alter the cost of the larger model.
Put Yourself Ahead of the Competition
Even if you’ve researched your competition and determined that your material is superior, don’t expect it always to be the case. For example, you may never know when a new competitor will appear and increase their website copy or blog postings to compete with you.
Being more aware of the quality of your content from the start will help you stay ahead in your industry when it comes to having the most impressive online presence.
After all, it’s about being better than the competition in every aspect – this doesn’t just mean the product or service you’re offering or the price you’re charging. In fact, the more professionally you communicate with potential customers, the more likely they are to pay.
Using incorrect grammar and punctuation, such as your instead of you’re, can send away potential customers in minutes.
In today’s digital world, with shorter attention spans than ever before, you only have seconds to grab your prospects’ attention and keep it.
Prevent Publishing Content with Poor Grammar
“There’s no way I’ll make that many grammatical mistakes,” you may think. However, the fact is that we all make basic mistakes from time to time. Therefore, it’s more important to ensure that what we’re putting out there is as excellent as it can be before hitting “send” or “publish.”
You can do a few things to avoid putting out a blog article, white paper, or landing page with spelling and grammatical errors. You may also apply many of these methods to your emails to ensure that every business email you send is as professional as possible.
The first and most obvious thing you can do is go through everything numerous times before publishing it. It helps if you take breaks – at least half an hour – and return to your material with a clean slate and viewpoint. It will assist in the detection of oversights that may have slipped past you while it was all foremost on your mind.
When proofreading, try changing the view; if you’re viewing a Word document, read a .pdf copy of your content; or, if you’re working in a WordPress editor, preview it instead.
You’ll be surprised at how much you can improve your writing skills by having another pair of eyes. Someone else is sure to notice all of the things that your attention is fleeing from. Editors are particularly useful in publications since they help catch anything the author may have missed before publishing. If you don’t have access to an editor, request that someone.
However, an editor or a colleague writer is generally preferred to a friend or family member who may not be as well-versed in spelling and grammar conventions. After all, you need someone who will not only notice that you have a typing error that the spell check missed – but also someone who will notice if there’s an apostrophe misplaced.
Not everyone has a friend or someone else who may proofread their work. However, you don’t need to worry about it in this digital era. While Microsoft Word and other word processors offer built-in spelling and grammar checks, they don’t catch everything. However, additional editorial tools are available that are specifically created to improve what Word and similar word processors can do.
The free version of Grammarly is another excellent example of a program created with the explicit goal of detecting these kinds of mistakes. Using the free edition of a service like this will catch more errors than your typical word processor software.
Many individuals find that this eliminates the cost of hiring an editor or proofreader, allowing them to avoid the unpleasantness of asking someone else for their time. In addition, most editing programs include add-ons for your web browser and email client, ensuring fewer embarrassing typos in critical business correspondence. Don’t Neglect the Editing Phase. You Won’t Regret It.
Finally, a grammar check is critical no matter what you’re writing or performing. There’s no need to call your first (or even second) draft your final copy. It’s pointless to make things perfect in a hurry – you should always go over your material before sending it out to anybody.
A grammar check before you start your work will save you many headaches, including the risk of losing prospective clients, avoiding legal difficulties, and keeping things clear between you and your consumers.