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.