Are You Dotting Your i’s and Crossing Your t’s?
September 26th, 2006 by Sophie WegatI’ve been online a long time. At least *cough* 12 years. Back in the early days “netiquitte” was taken really seriously.
The basic rules include:
- YOU DON’T SHOUT,
- You don’t quote slabs of text,
- And my favourite, you check, and correct your spelling and grammar.
I always took the approach that online you are judged by your written word, in the same way that offline you’re judged by your appearance. Would you wear crumpled, dirty clothes and unpolished shoes when meeting with a potential client? I suspect not. So why write an email with no capitalisation, no punctuation and definitely no spell checking?
Now I don’t mean to be uptight, and I do appreciate that online communication is far less formal that the old written letter (thank heaven’s), but in my opinion if you can’t add an apostrophe to a word, or end a sentence with a full stop, I’ll suspect you don’t polish your shoes either. 
Keep in mind a few minutes making sure your written words are “polished” could be the difference between a sale or no sale.
September 26th, 2006
7:12 pm
Absolutely agree Sophie. I have explained this concept to clients that the added effort of spellchecking their pages and even offline advertising can and does make the difference.
I was at a recent brekfast meeting and 2 young ladies who had set up a new business were handing out self printed leaflets advertising what they did. Their leaflet had 12 spelling mistakes - at first I was interested but when I saw their spelling I got the feeling if they could not be bothered with spelling and punctuation how were they going to treat their customers?
Daz
September 26th, 2006
7:12 pm
PS Spot the silly spelling mistake above! :((
September 27th, 2006
8:10 am
Don’t you hate that.
I admit I did spell check that post 3 times just in case…
Still your points are really valid. It’s one thing to have a spelling mistake in a blog post but, in your marketing material???
September 28th, 2006
12:35 pm
Your basic rules are correct.
However for one thing I like to shout
DO NOT QUOTE SLABS OF TEXT.
I am a SysAdmin of a number of mailservers, the
traffic that is generated through the stupidity
of user appending to the appended is
electron boggling.
September 28th, 2006
12:55 pm
Welcome Jobst.
I hear you! Some of the “joke” emails I receive go on forever, with forward after forward. And I hardly ever read them anyway.
September 28th, 2006
5:21 pm
I showed a new client your blog yesterday and he thought it was hilarious that in my comment about spellchecking there was a spelling error. Oh the shame!
But it does show people instantly pick up bad spelling.
Daz
September 29th, 2006
12:01 pm
Daz, so you didn’t point it out to him?
September 30th, 2006
1:38 am
Sophie
Kind of, as I mentioned “spot the stupid spelling mistake” he’d already got there… oh yes he did see the funny side to that but also agreed that your blogs post on spelling was spot on.
It has not helped me having a manic week and having to rush around like a looney… less haste would help…
Daz