Good grammar isn’t simply a topic that was important to your 9th grade English teacher. It’s critical to ensuring that the writing associated with your business—your email messages, blog posts, e-newsletters, Facebook updates, etc.—is professional.
Why? Why is good grammar so important? Because, like it or not, when you write using poor grammar, it makes you look bad.
Daniel Kahneman says so.
Who is Daniel Kahneman, and why should you care what he thinks?
Basically, he’s a very smart dude who has written about this very topic. How smart? He won the Nobel Prize (in Economic Sciences) for psychological studies he performed that “challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making.” People a lot smarter than me refer to him as “one of our most important thinkers.”
In a recent book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Kahneman specifically writes about how online typos cause readers to subconsciously lose trust in the writer. The end result? You lose credibility (and, possibly, even business) when you don’t make good grammar a priority.
But Mrs. Grammarian!
I’m Not a Grammar Guru!
I know. I know. You recognize the importance of good grammar. You just don’t know how to ensure you have it. While my first temptation is simply to tell you to hire a grammar guru (such as myself) to clean up your prose, I know that most folks simply can’t afford that.
Besides, a whole mess of folks out there don’t even realize they make a lot of errors in their writing. Thus, have no idea they need an editor.
So, whether you are:
- A poor writer who knows it but doesn’t know how to improve her grammar.
- A poor writer who thinks he is a good writer and doesn’t know he needs to improve his grammar.
- A so-so writer who simply wants to be a better writer.
I’ve got the perfect article for you:
10 Grammar Mistakes That Can Keep Your Content From Spreading
I wish I could say I wrote this article. It’s definitely one I could have written; it touches on the most-common errors I correct when I’m editing content for my clients. But, lucky for me, Alexis Grant at Copyblogger did it for me. Even better? She did it very concisely with easy-to-understand explanations.
Bravo, Alexis! You are helping the world become more literate, one writer at a time!
What about you? Do you think your writing has good grammar? Do you make these errors? Were you even aware that they were errors? Tell me what advice you could use to improve your writing.
