Today I came across a posting for a product being sold online. The product was some kind of partially prepared meat. Specifically it was pork. The product description included the following text (original formatting is preserved):
The finest cuts of "All Natural" Pork...
Besides the fact that the complete sentence was a fragment, not a complete sentence (this is sometimes permissible in less formal writing, like advertisements), the use of bold type is not exactly appropriate here. In advertisement though, bold type is often used for emphasis, because it draws the eye better (in most formal writing, italics are used for emphasis, while bold type is very rarely used because it breaks visual continuity). My problem with this is the inappropriate use of quotation marks. Quotation marks applied in that way around an adjective typically indicate that something is not what it claims, at least in informal writing (which advertising is). So, this "All Natural" pork (yes, capitalizing "pork" is also not correct writing) must not be all pork, otherwise they would have called it All Natural pork, right? Sadly, this is probably not true. Whoever wrote that text probably thought that the quotation marks somehow emphasize or even strengthen the claim of all-naturalness. Really, they imply that the person saying the words is smiling and winking as they say them, indicating that they want someone else to think the pork is all natural, when it really is not (sometimes people even make a quote mark gesture with hands to further indicate that there is innuendo involved). This is not the most common mistake I see, but it does seem to come up frequently.
Perhaps the most common mistakes are grammatical errors. Most (though not all) advertisements use correct spellings. The most common misspellings are homophones, where the misspelling is actually a word that sounds the same but is not the intended word. Spell checkers do not catch these words, but a good editor or proofreader would have. (The worst spelling error I have seen on an ad was in Utah, where some real-estate company thought "available" was spelled "availble." Even a pretty lame spell checker would have caught that one.) Grammatical errors, however, indicate that the writer did not even bother to reread the text. In most cases, grammatical errors stick out when the writing is read out loud, and any English teacher will suggest that students read their work out loud to make sure it sounds how they intended. Right next to run of the mill grammatical errors is incomplete sentences. These drive me nuts, because I can see that the sentence is trying to say something, but when it ends prematurely, it leaves me wondering (imagine if this sentence stopped here; what the heck does it leave me wondering; I'll be kind) where it was going.
This epidemic of poor writing skills leads to two conclusions: Either most people are too stupid to remember anything they learned in school long enough to use it, or the schools are doing a horrible job of teaching it in the first place. Given the state of our education system, I think the evidence favors the second conclusion. I'll admit that many people do not realize the importance of communication skills and choose not to put any effort into maintaining them, but that is a huge amount of people to accuse of stupidity or laziness, and I would prefer to give the benefit of the doubt.
Some people might wonder why this matters. Even with rampant misspellings and grammatical errors, it is still easy to tell what most advertisements want (I'll give you a hint, they want you to give someone else your money in exchange for products of dubious value). Communication is about getting your point across, and if they do that, does it really matter how badly they are written? Well, yes. Do you want to by "All Natural" pork, or would you rather buy All Natural pork (or even "All Natural pork" or All Natural "pork" where it could be a veiled reference to pork flavored cat or dog meat)? These are two different things. Even if the company does actually mean that it is all natural (and not fake all natural), if they cannot communicate that effectively, what else are they mis-communicating that is not so obvious? That real-estate company certainly does not impress me with their proficiency in their job. Maybe they only forgot an "a" in that sign. What happens if they forget a "0" when they are selling my house (or add one when I am buying it)? On that sign, one missing letter only makes them look inept. On a contract, one missing letter (or digit) could be disastrous. Misspelling and grammatical errors can change the meaning of a word or phrase. You might notice five or ten errors in a company's advertisements over a year or two. Consider though, how many did you miss? How many errors were there that did not turn the text into nonsense but still managed to change the meaning significantly? In fact, if you pay close attention, you may notice that many national retail chains post ad retractions or errata on their doors several times a year. Most often this is because they either mis-advertised a sale price, or they mismatched a sale price with the wrong product. Incidentally, a video game store in Utah once mis-advertised a price, and when I went to buy it, they refused to honor their advertisement, even though they had not posted any retraction. I never bought anything there again. Writing skills are worth customers. When I see an ad with an obvious writing error, it makes me less willing to buy products from that company, because it makes it clear that they do not care about quality.
I may have discussed this before, but this applies outside of advertisement. Good writing skills are also important on resumes. I have heard arguments that throwing out poorly written resumes might lose opportunities to hire good employees. I think this is wrong, at least in most cases. Most businesses get far more applications than they can read. They use fast filter techniques to reduce the pile to a manageable size. These techniques involve things like looking for writing errors and checking qualifications. If they fail one of these tests, they go in the garbage. Now, I cannot claim that tossing resumes with writing errors will not eliminate qualified candidates that might do a good job. I can claim, however, that it will not sacrifice opportunities for the business to hire good employees. Unless the business needs almost as many employees as there are applications, filtering will leave, on average, a much more qualified selection of employees to choose from. If someone thinks that the company lost a really good opportunity when they threw out his or her resume, that person needs an ego check, and really, the other employees would probably have hated that person's self centered, big headed attitude anyway. In today's economy, there is always someone else who could fill the position just as well. And, if that person has better written communication skills, they can probably even fill it better.
Poor writing skills signal several things. First, they signal that you are too lazy to do a good job. Second, they signal that you really do not care about whatever you are writing for. Third, they signal a lack of precision and attention to detail. Forth, they signal a lack of good education (a college degree does not necessarily mean you still know anything from the classes you took, and poor writing skills is evidence that you have allowed yourself to forget at least one important subject you took classes in). Fifth, they signal a lack of caring about quality. When a person looks at an advertisement or a resume and sees writing errors, that person gets an impression of laziness, lack of motivation, lack of attention to detail, lack of education, and lack of quality about the person or company responsible. That is why it matters. Writing errors will cause people to look for a company with a better reputation or hire a person who's resume looks like he or see cares, even if technical qualifications are not quite as good. A person or company who puts the effort into avoiding mistakes in writing can probably put the effort into becoming more proficient and more qualified. Poor writing provides no such evidence.
I do not think this is purely an educational problem. I am sure there are people who write poorly because they are lazy and because they are not motivated and because they do not care about attention to detail and so on, but I do think education is the root of the problem. I have friends and family members that ask me to proofread their writing because they do care about attention to detail, but they do not have the quality English education to do a good job of it themselves. This is not their fault. Their lack of English education is the fault of public schools and even private universities who neglect their responsibility to properly educate their students. (In fact, my good English education is largely the result of studying far beyond what was required in school and college and then studiously applying it until I developed strong skills. The schools themselves just provided me with a small amount of resources to build on.)
I just want to add that I am not perfect. I do make writing mistakes, though not typically very often. I reread this article twice (once out loud), correcting errors along the way, before I published it, but there are probably a few still lurking in here somewhere. I sincerely hope they are not obvious, but if they are, I take full responsibility for missing them. If this were a professional publication, I would ask some of my friends to review it before publishing, and I would reread it at least two more times. If it were a resume, I would probably reread it four more times. As an informal opinion piece that I am posting on my blog (that has a fairly small readership) though, I just do not have the time to put that much effort into it.
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