Don't you just hait that?

Don’t worry, that really is a deliberate mistake. But how does it make you feel? Angry? Frustrated? Tearing your hair out? Join the club.

But aren’t we just overreacting a teensy little bit? Do spelling errors and grammatical inconsistencies really matter that much?

They really do. And I’ll prove it to you.

It looks like Christmas is going to be a busy time here at Clear-Comms, so I thought I’d get in early with some Christmas preparations. Like making sure my children get their letters from Father Christmas. Or, according to one site, that would be their ‘letter’s’ from Father Christmas. One mistake, I could live with. But this superfluous comma was repeated throughout the site. No mince pies for that grammatically challenged Santa!

That little faux pas was all I needed to take my business elsewhere. After all, if they couldn’t be bothered to get that right, what hope for the letter itself? Would my children grow up thinking Father Christmas had snuck out of English Lessons for a crafty mince pie behind the reindeer sheds?

Fortunately, we’re not the only ones who think this is important. Charles Duncombe, the entrepreneur and director behind the Just Say Please group, recently told the BBC that you could actually identify the specific impact of a spelling mistake on your sales. (So that would be a selling mistake.)

He had the figures to back him up too. Apparently, revenue from his tightsplease.co.uk website nearly doubled once a spelling error had been corrected. Based on that sort of figure, it’s safe to say that spelling mistakes and grammatical mistakes probably account for millions of pounds worth of lost revenue every week.

So clearly, it pays to get these things right, eh Santa?

Competition time

Given that we’re so focused on getting these things right, what happens when we get them wrong? Why don’t you find out? There’s a spelling mistake waiting to be found in our first newsletter. If you can find it, we’ll treat you to 5% off our next project fee.

Oh, and if you’re not on ‘the list’ just send us your name and email address to sign up.

What's in a name?

I used to be a copywriter. A good one too, clients told me. But these days, I'm a freelance writer. Now, I know what you're thinking. But trust me, this isn't just semantics.

At Clear Comms, we work hard to create exceptional sales copy that's clear and easy to read. And that means every word we use has to fight for its place. If we don't need it, we don't use it. It's as simple as that. So we don't like needless ambiguity. And that word - copywriter - is a great example.

Tell people you're a copywriter and plenty of them will think you're a copyrighter. It's an easy mistake to make. But we really don't know very much about protecting artistic rights. No one's asked us to write about that yet.

So why all this fuss over one little word? Well, whenever I'm meeting new people and talking shop, I'd much rather talk about what I do, than what I don't do. Tell someone I'm a freelance writer and we can get straight to the interesting stuff. Typical next question: "Oh really, what sorts of things do you write..."

Okay, I'll admit it. This isn't a big issue. However, it is a good example of the way we think. We don't take things at face value. We scrutinise job outlines and creative proofs to ensure they make sense. And we keep working at getting things right. Sometimes that means going against the old ways of doing or saying things. So be it.

I'll be interested to hear what anyone else has to say about this. You can even call me to talk it over if you like, just don't call me a copywriter!