Why do errors in grammar, spelling, and word usage matter in real estate marketing?
Because those errors make the reader focus on our words instead of our message.
And when readers pay more attention to the words that the thoughts they are trying to convey, communication falters.
Nobody writes just to exercise their fingers – we write to communicate. We may have a marketing message; we may be trying to persuade someone to see things our way; we may have information to convey; we may have a story to share; or we may just want to let someone know that we care about them. Whatever the reason, we want to be "heard" and understood.
Errors in grammar, spelling, and word usage interfere with that communication.
Some small errors go pretty much unnoticed – for instance, when we transpose two letters in a word.
Others act as huge stop signs.
The reader stops, perhaps re-reads, and either skips the whole thing or spends a minute trying to decide what we meant.
Depending upon the magnitude of the errors, they can also make us look ignorant, careless, and worse. The MLS entries reproduced in Gwen Banta's blooper posts are prime examples.
We've called attention to our words instead of our message.
And it's not just errors that can interfere with communication.
Sometimes it's not that the words are incorrect, but that they're wrong for the audience. When we choose to use words that some in our audience don't understand, we throw up another stop sign. Worse, we can alienate the reader, because he or she might feel insulted, or feel that we are trying to establish superiority by "talking down." That's not the way to win friends and influence people.
It may sound strange, but our real goal in writing should be to make our words disappear.
We don't want our readers to see our words – we want them to absorb our message. Properly used, the words are simply a tool to convey the message – they're not an end in themselves.
Some disagree…
I've had agents write to tell me that it doesn't matter whether they make grammar, spelling, or word usage errors – as long as people can understand what they're saying.
And that's the point. When readers get hung up on the errors or the choice of words, they may not even notice what the writer is saying, let alone understand it.
So – we all make mistakes. (Yes, I do too, so I speak from experience.) But we should do our best to avoid them, and to correct them as quickly as possible.
- We should proofread.
- We should check the dictionary if we aren't certain how to spell a word.
- We should check Grammar Girl if we aren't sure about usage.
- We should NOT rely on spell check and functions like auto-correct, because they don't necessarily know that we have websites and not web sights.
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