The Importance Of Editing

Is this an editing error or honesty in advertising?

While mistakes like this can be a source of entertainment for us, they are probably not as funny to the person making them.  I can’t see all that many negative consequences because of a misspelling on a fast food sign, but when they are found in the marketing materials for your business, that is a different story.

Grammar and spelling mistakes or being unclear in your writing can have a number of negative effects for your business.

• Your readers will think you are not real smart or maybe unedumacated.
• They will see you as lazy for not taking the time to cheque your work.
• You will be not able to earn their trustworthiness.
• Without clear and concise sentences, your readers can become confused and irritated, thus abandoning their reading of your literary work, never to return or follow your call to action so that you can benefit in any way and eat some fruit of your labor.
• You might not be as funny as you think you are.  Something that you think is hilarious can come off as being insulting when read by others.

For all these reasons and more, it is important that you edit your work.  Something as simple as a spell check with your word processor can make a huge difference.

The marketing piece that you are producing will also determine the level of editing that you should consider.  For something as large and high level as a white paper, you may consider a professional editor while your articles and press releases may just need a spell check and a read over by a friend or colleague.  Blogs are much more casual and may only need a spell check.  Although, some would argue that the grammatical and spelling mistakes often found in blogs are part of it’s realism so you might even skip the spell check here.

Sometimes we get too close to our work and cannot see the details clearly.   If you want your writing to be taken seriously by your readers, take the extra step of having someone read over your work to catch those potentially damaging mistakes.

** Here are 5 common mistakes that you should be especially aware of brought to you by Brian Clark over at Copyblogger.

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