We’re going to spell it out for you

At the outset, this topic might seem a little sophomoric for an ad agency blog whose readership is made up of business owners. But as we can readily attest: Sometimes it’s the most fundamental principals that get overlooked. The topic? Grammar in your marketing, advertising and PR, and in all your written communications, really.

Your written words are an extension of you and your business, and whether that business is lawn maintenance or running a charter school for advanced students, your market has a level of expectation about your professionalism. And one of the marks of professionalism is high-quality writing.

You know the message you get about a job seeker who submits a resume peppered with typos, or the feeling you get when you read “expresso” on a coffee shop menu instead of the correct “espresso.” Well, if you want to keep from feeding that perception about your own business to your market, just apply the following three concepts to all the words generated by your company and you’ll catch the vast majority of poor grammar before it gets out the door.

1. Sit on it.

Whether copywriter, journalist or a businessperson who generates 100 emails a day, the more comfortable you get with words, the faster you can whip them out. Grammatically, however, speed can get you into trouble. It leads to transposed letters, misspelled words, you name it. So, let the copy sit for a length of time, and then read it again.

In the ad agency biz, we let copy marinate from weeks to a day to sometimes an hour or less, depending on the scope and urgency of the project. But you can be sure we have a zero-tolerance system in place that involves setting aside the words for a period of time. If your “project” is an email, then sitting on it for you might mean five minutes, and that’s fine. The point is that with the passage of time, your eyes recharge and get fresher. Also, because proofing your own work is difficult, a second set of eyes is always a good idea.

2. Read it aloud.

Reading silently and reading aloud employ different brain functions. When you read silently, the tendency is to fix typos in your mind and accept poor choices in verbiage—basically correct subliminally what is incorrect on the page. Reading silently concentrates on what is said.

Reading aloud focuses on how it is said. You can hear the words independently of each other and also their rhythm in combination. Typos become more evident, as do misspellings, missing words and poor grammatical choices.

3. Turn on your spellchecker.

The number of people who don’t use the spell check feature on their computer is astounding. Is it always right? Heck no. Will it catch every error? Not even close. If you don’t know the difference between a painter’s “palette,” a wooden “pallet” and the “palate” in your mouth, for example, chances are spell check won’t catch the misuse of the three nouns either. But what it does catch makes it a powerful and handy backup.

Of course, there are a lot more tools in the copywriting trade and if you ever want to while away an afternoon discussing them, we’d be glad to oblige. However, if your hands are full running your business and you’d like RWA to worry about your marketing- and advertising-related grammar, we’d be glad to help you out there as well. Just pick up the fone.