Chris How | Blog | Ça va pas la tête

Is spelling important? Does grammar matter? Do typos and solecisms turn you away from a product? As someone who works with web content I’m firmly in the ‘yes’ camp. To me a misspelt word speaks volumes about the care, or lack of, running through your brand.

Now we all make spelling and grammar mistakes but for me the closer a word is to the core of your business the more erosion of persuasion occurs.

Working on a major travel site it raises my hackles to see common words like Caribbean and accommodation misspelt. With the web being indexed so thoroughly by Google common misspellings are also easy to find. For example try searching the whole of Expedia by putting in the Google search bar: site:www.expedia.co.uk accomodation.

Another bug bear of mine is the unnecessary addition of an apostrophe in plurals, such as DJs, from people who should know better. A quick Google search throws up:

• Live Music Management who claim to be the UK’s Premier Entertainment Agency offering to ’supply mobile dj’s for weddings, parties etc’
• Radio 1 gets in on the act with their webpage for the show: ‘In New DJ’s We Trust. Every Thursday night, Friday morning at 2am’
• On Thomson holidays the page for Ibiza bound clubbers offers this advice: ‘if you’re looking for big name DJ’s catch a cab or ferry to San Antonio Town’

Some words are frequently misspelt which to me means you pay more attention when proof-reading them. Environment is one such word, which students at Winchester claim to care about. Obviously not enough to spell it correctly in the url or title tag of their ‘enviroment policies’ webpage.

There is an irony that finding all the above has been made easy using Google which is itself possibly the world’s most eminent typo. Back in 1998 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up their fledgling search engine they were looking for a name that demonstrated the quantity of data you could search. Googol is in fact what they meant, being the mathematical term for a one followed by 100 zeros.

Within ten years this neologism has become one of the world’s most recognizable words, entered the lexicon not only as a noun but also making the leap into dictionaries as a fully fledged verb. Not bad for a humble typo.

This entry was posted on October 19, 2008 at 5:57 pm and is filed under language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.