When people first see your commercials, website or email from your company within a few seconds they form an irreversible idea about your company, its products and the website. Everyone who has spent a considerable amount of time on social media sites has perhaps noticed how the standards of grammar and spelling has been lowered. The random mistakes have made us heavily dependent on auto correct usage.For business owners and app developers the grammatical mistakes have a larger effect. If your message isn’t clear and you inadvertently misuse apostrophe and comma,potential customers will notice- react and cause you to lose your sales.
The importance of grammar therefore, can’t be underestimated. Despite depending heavily on auto correct and various grammar correction tools, mistakes are bound to happen. Grammatical mistakes on social media sites are particularly tricky- for when your message goes live, there is nothing much you can do to fix it! Constant corrections on your website or on your mobile apps will certainly hurt your brand’s credibility. Whether it is a social media tweet, newsletter or any marketing message is sure to get messed up if your grammar is incorrect! For example, something as simple as comma splice could force your readers to re read the message again. Clarity - therefore is of utmost importance.
Won’t you be skeptical to associate yourself with a brand that doesn’t proofread the contents before publishing? It sure shall raise doubts about the professionalism and attention to detail. Companies are therefore expected to create error free content, and when they don’t- it is bound to receive a backlash!
MailChimp has highlighted the fact that ‘About 15% of the world’s population lives with a disability. That’s one billion people. Of those billion people, 285 million are visually impaired and may use a screen reader to access web content.These assistive devices use page elements to navigate web and email content, and read text aloud.For those living with disabilities, accessible content isn’t just about convenience, it’s about necessity’.
This certainly gives the message that your audience should be able to access your content without any problems.
Misused words
Entities of all kinds have been impacted by incorrect grammar—even the federal government. In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant passed a tariff act in which “fruit plants, tropical, and semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation” were exempt from the tariff. Somehow an extra comma was inserted, so the new law read “fruit, plants, tropical and semi-tropical…”. This error cost the federal government approximately $2 million (roughly $40 million in today’s dollars after adjusting for inflation).
Welsh engineering firm Taylor and Sons were impacted when a British business registry announced the firm had closed its doors, when, in fact, it was Taylor & Son (singular) that ceased operations. Over 250 employees had lost their jobs.
“Your” vs “You’re” - These words are often misused in a comical way.
Example: You are the best intern we hired.
Your marketing skills are impressive!
“Two”, “too” and “to” - While to is a verb, two represents a number!
Example: He wanted to go to the bank
She asked for two packets of bread.
I too wanted to have an ice cream.
“Affect” vs “Effect”- Affect is a verb and Effect is a noun.
Example: Bad weather affected our plans.
“Ensure” vs “Insure” - To ensure is to guarantee. To insure means to provide protection.
Example: We ensured all the doors and windows were locked.
Seems wanted to insure her new Ipad.
“Whether” vs “Weather”- Another word for if. Natural phenomenon.
Example: I wondered whether to take an umbrella or not.
Oh look at the weather outside!
“Loan” vs “Lend”- Loan is a noun. Lend is a verb.
Example: Shital asked for a loan.
Could you lend me your notebook?
“Lay” vs “lie”- Lay is used when the object is being acted upon.
Example: The teacher said ‘lay the book on the table’.
She went to lie down.
“There”, “Their”, “They’re”-
Example: Look there.
It is their house.
They’re going to play badminton this weekend.
“Its” vs “it’s”-
Example: It’s going to rain.
Nature renews on its own.
Punctuation mistakes
Commas- The usage of commas is a critical one. In the past several companies have spent millions on lawsuits related to written policies and procedures in which the comma was missing, thus changing the meaning of the sentence.
Incorrect: The suit was available in red green and yellow.
Correct: The suit was available in red, green and yellow.
Comma splice- Occurs when period should have been used.It creates one joint sentence instead of two separate ones.
Incorrect: I don’t know the difference it was never explained to me.
Correct: I don’t know the difference. It was never explained to me.
Colon- Used to begin a quotation.
Incorrect: Kamala said Harish you are a gentleman.
Correct: Kamala said “Harish you are a gentleman”.
Other grammatical mistakes
Writing a sentence using all capital words.
Using too many adverbs.
Wrong usage of active and passive voice in a sentence.
Not using proper punctuations in the sentence.
Therefore, it is important to check your work for grammatical or spelling errors before you publish them. A brand is likely to lose more customers if it is unable to effectively communicate with its audience.As the saying goes “It is better to be sure than sorry”.A grammar corrector tool is a handy tool often used by bloggers, writers, essayists and businessmen. These tools often come in handy to quickly check a piece of work and fix the grammatical errors. Unlike the MSWord spell check option, a wide range of both free as well as paid tools are available online to make editing easy. Grammar correctors are intended to fix spelling, grammatical errors, fix hard to understand passages and work on misplaced and misused apostrophe or word in a document. Alternatively, the best way to stay error free is to read your content aloud or to have it reviewed by your peers.
Get ability to change strings in mobile apps dynamically, using Appscms
On social media the rules are relaxed and writing mixed up are either forgiven or forgotten ,but marketing communications like - emails, web pages, newsletters with spelling and grammatical mistakes not only create hurdles for effective communication but also raise questions on the brands credibility. Therefore it is important for brands not to make these silly errors!
At Appscms, we help you with- Over the air string update- Instant update, hassle free! Effective translation- Multilingual availability, just a click away! All you need to do is just integrate our SDK in your app.
Appscms provides a simple enough solution for app developers to change their content on their user’s mobile apps without them having to upgrade the app.Hence Appscms will be of use to app developers to change content - like spelling or grammatical errors on their app instantly! Do you know someone who could benefit from our services? Our team is eager to connect with businesses in any industry.
“At Appscms, we make your apps dynamic”
