There is no doubt that blogging has been tremendously empowering to millions of people all around the world, people who would never have been heard before and now have the chance to get read by thousands of people.

I think this is fantastic, and that anyone who wants to, should have a blog and do with it what they want. I’m tired of the blog snobs who denigrate a particular area of blogging out of spite - reading a blog is optional, and readers vote with their eyes, so you go ahead and write about anything you want, and don’t listen to people who say you shouldn’t.

The But 

But, (you knew that was coming!) if you’re going to write, do it right - right? The vast majority of potential readers will evaluate your blog in seconds, and I’m no different. It can depend on a whole host of things, speed of loading, presentation, colour scheme, amount/lack of images etc. But if you manage to get them over those hurdles, and into reading your blog, there’s one last thing (other than content, which is your choice alone) that can drive them away again:

Poor spelling and grammar.

Now I know there’s lot of people who say this isn’t important, it’s the quality of the content that counts etc. To which I can only reply: Rubbish. If you blog, you work in a written medium, and you have to abide by those rules. Now I, and most others, aren’t going to abandon your blog because of a couple of simple errors, but if your writing is riddled with them, then it will cost you readers.

Here’s a few of the errors that drive me insane:

  1. “Wallah!” - As in, ‘ I present my latest post, wallah!’. Oh dear. Did you mean ‘voilà!’ which is French for ‘look there’, and commonly used as a reveal in English?
  2. “Without further adieu” - Without anymore goodbyes? Or do you mean ‘without further ado’ which essentially means ‘enough talk, here you go’.
  3. “Here here!” - Where where? The correct form is ‘hear hear’ meaning you second an opinion.
  4. “Bare with me” - Get naked with you? We’ve hardly met! I actually saw this on a high traffic corporate blog yesterday, and it just makes me cringe. ‘Bear with me’ as I list some more.
  5. “Their, There, They’re” - Occasionally difficult, but just remember that ‘their’ pertains to possession i.e. belonging to someone, ‘there’ effectively refers to location, whilst ‘they’re’ is a contraction of ‘they are’.
  6. “Hilight” - You may be a friendly type who enjoys greeting their lamps, but I’ll have to ‘highlight’ your error.
  7. “Text Speak” - Vowels were invented for a reason, use them. Unless your target audience is 13 year old girls, or you use MySpace where vowels are banned under international treaty, give it up now. OKTHKSBI!
  8. Punctuation - OK I admit that I sometimes get this wrong but how difficult is it to read a sentence that just runs on with no apparent end and you wouldn’t believe how hard it is for me to type without hitting the comma key either and have I made my point yet? Paragraph breaks help too.
  9. Text colour - Black on white looks just right, white on black, I may be back, but lurid shocking pink on black with flashing purple headings mean my eyes will probably eject out of my head on their own accord.

I could probably go on all day, but you get the point. Occasional lapses happen to everyone, but if the first post somebody reads on your blog is full of the above examples, they’ll think you’re an idiot and go elsewhere.

Spelling

Spelling errors are also pretty much unacceptable. We can all leave off the last letter of some words: ‘you’ instead of ‘your’ but everything else can pretty much be picked up with a spell checker. Use the Firefox web browser (even if only for writing posts!) and it’s excellent spell checker will save you more times than you can imagine. Might teach you a few spellings too - it has for me (I have a real mental block around i and e in the correct order).

The Point 

Please don’t think I’m making fun of people: I visit loads of new blogs a day, and one thing that really drives me away is consistently poor spelling & punctuation. I also know that I’m far from perfect, and I look forward to all of the corrections to this posts grammar etc. But I will learn from it ;-)

Are there any pet hates of yours that I’ve missed from the list?