Spelling, Grammar & The Web

Now that you have

• focused on a niche
• found your keyword phrase
• written your article

You have one last hurdle to handle. It’s the hurdle that keeps most people from a writing career. Fact is, spelling and grammar can cause you to not succeed in the offline world very easily.

Online?

Your audience is much more forgiving.

Sure there are those who will hold you to task, but all-in-all you can get away with much more online than offline.

Still, I recommend that you use a tool like MS Word to catch the bigger problems.

No reason to misspell a word when you have it directly within your means to not do that.

As it relates to being grammatically correct, I largely don’t find myself worrying a great deal about the topic. Will I lose some readers? No doubt. But the amount of people I can reach using the Web is so large that it really doesn’t matter which people choose not to put my information in their circle of influence or not.

In fact, some applications like Twitter@ naturally move you away from correct usages of both spelling and grammar.

IE: gr8 2 C U 2day. How R U & how was yer weekend?

Try turning that in on an English paper? But on the Web, things are different.

However, with that said I do believe it important to point out that the clearer a person can be in communicating what they have to say the better chances that their audience will actually understand them.

Being understood is always a good thing no matter what media you are using.

To that end, sentence clarity can be important both in grammar and spelling. My point here is that writing for the World Wide Web is much easier as people will tolerate more poor sentences than off the Internet.

Another anomaly to the Web is the style in which you write.Remember those long paragraphs in English class? Well, forget them.

On the Web you gain far more ground by using short crisp paragraphs combined with bullets and numbers. The easier you make it for people to scan your copy the greater the chance that your writings will actually be read.

Also, long articles are out.

Short articles that are between 300 and 500 characters long is what is desired. There is far too much to read on the Web. If you stand above the rest by making your content easy to navigate they will forgive you 100 times over for your misusages of grammar.