At this point you’re probably tired of reading about how you’re supposed to read and edit your work, and make sure it looks and sounds good. Blah, blah, blah, sounds like English class. Tired you may be, but I really can’t emphasize this enough. There are huge companies and corporations out there that have typos in their information, or missing words, and you can only find so many before you start to lose faith in them.

Here is an image taken from one of Google’s official pages:

Missing a little word like “to” is not at all a serious offense, especially for a company as colossal as Google, but it could result in poor traffic for your website. You are likely a smaller business, getting your feet wet with SEO and trying to draw traffic in, and the last thing you want to do is lose people because of something silly like a typo (“to” will probably not cause you to lose credibility, but a collection of grammatical errors will). By sheer lack of trust in the information you are providing, people will not return.

There is a book I stopped reading because there were too many typos. There were spaces missing, there were too many spaces, misspelled words and improper punctuation. These typos were primarily featured – located in fact sections that were outlined, purposely designed to attract your attention. I found around ten before I shelved the book (I started looking for them on purpose). You think that’s harsh? Think of it this way: If you have enough knowledge and care for the subject you’re writing about, then you should have enough knowledge and care to want to display this information in the most professional way. If you don’t take your work seriously, how do you expect everyone else to? If you’re not good with writing skills, then have someone look it over before you go submitting it (and yes, the publishing company to that book should have picked up on the typos, so shame on everyone involved).

Spelling and punctuation are not the only things you should pay attention to when editing your work. Make sure your information is accurate. This should go without saying, but if you’re producing information for people to read, be extra sure your statements are as true as they can be. You’ve got two different kinds of people reading: people who know nothing about the subject, and people who know a lot about the subject.

Here is an example:

“Gigabit. Just say it and the word drips off the tongue like honey. Gig-a-bit. A hundred times faster than megabit. A thousand times faster than kilobit. Wow, that’s wicked fast.” –PC Magazine, June 26, 2007

If you don’t know too much about computers and speeds, this paragraph probably seems just fine to you. There aren’t any spelling errors, but the information is way off. A gigabit is actually a thousand times faster than a megabit, and a million times faster than a kilobit (now that’s wicked fast). This ended up being a big mistake on the part of PC Magazine, and caused a lot of retractions to the article. Several readers were disappointed in the magazine and many stopped reading it, for that reason alone. One article.

I hope you can see why I continue to stress the editing process. Yes, you’re an online resource (most of you), and being online immediately requires you to produce information at a faster pace – typos will happen, words will be missed. All I am saying is that you should try to pay more attention to what you’re doing. It may be difficult at first to convince yourself to reread your writing to ensure it’s kosher, but I swear it’s well worth it. You can never have too many good habits.

*I am not at all claiming to be perfect in what I write. People make mistakes, honest ones, but going over what you’ve done will reduce your mistakes immensely.

**Oh, and as another side note: People lose their jobs over major typos (spelling or otherwise). If you cost a company thousands of dollars in revenue or unnecessary expenses, they are not going to keep you around very long.