Spelling Woes

I’m not trying to be picky, but when it comes to spelling (which is something I’m terrible at but I have someone to make sure I don’t sound like an idiot) I expect companies to have it together. When I see something on the Internet that is spelled incorrectly I can mostly chalk it up to the fast paced society that we live in and the need to get things out on the web as quickly as possible. But when I see something that has been printed and sent out that has errors in it, I can’t help but be completely turned off by the incompetence of the company and feel a strong urge to send a nasty letter to their team of editors.

Anytime you post something on the Internet or hand out a printed copy, whether it be an article, a blog post, or just a response to someone else’s article, make sure you are as accurate as possible so you don’t fall into the same categories as the following examples.

When out on the town for mothers day, I came across this sign while waiting for my flowers to be finished. I had to look at the sign for a moment to comprehend what I was really seeing. Could the “buisness” owner be this dumb? I have to take into consideration that I live in a small town where the inhabitants are frequently referred to as “hicks”, but I also have to wonder if the owner knows what spell check is.

They want to sell their business, but they can’t even get this right. And what about “inquireies”? I know that it’s supposed to say inquiries, but at first glance I can’t help but think that my eyes are playing tricks on me and this is some new word that I’ve never heard of before. Alas, it is not so. The person who made this sign should go back to grammar school, or at the very least get a dictionary.

My fiancée bought an MP3 player so he could enjoy music. Though there weren’t many directions or information with the device, there was a slip of yellow paper that stuck out like a sore thumb. You might have to zoom in on this picture to see it more clearly.

I’m not a punctuation Nazi, not at all, but since this is a big company you’d think that they could at least edit the information they put with their products. When looking at this image you might not see anything wrong, but when you look more closely you’ll notice that there is a space before the colon in the first paragraph. Sure not that big of a deal, though it is obvious that there shouldn’t be a space between “support” and the colon. The same thing happens at the very end of the memo where a space is placed before an exclamation mark. Are the editors of this document using some form of the English language that I’m not aware of?

The error that made me yell when I saw it was the floating comma. Personally, I hate commas. I loathe them because they always seem to end up wherever I don’t want them and never where they need to be, but never had I let a comma hang out all by itself without a word to hold onto. A comma is like a child needing a hand to hold. A comma needs a word to attach to rather than swimming in an abyss of white all by its lonesome.

The purpose of this article is to remind you to always spell check your work and let someone else take a look at it before you publish it to the world.

Written by Patricia Vennes from Writer's Rants
Posted on May 18th, 2009 and filed under Blogging, Writing
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