Bad Writing: Pet Peeves

There are many commonly made mistakes in the world of business writing, and every one of them has the potential to push someone's buttons--hard. Murphy's Law says that the someone will usually be the person you most hoped to impress.

Why any one person finds a relatively minor error infuriating is as impossible a question to answer as why some people like spinach and others don't. And to protest "you're making a big deal over nothing" never wins friends or customers, even if true. All we can do is write as flawlessly as possible, prove our professionalism by apologizing when someone complains ("thank you for setting me straight" rarely fails to turn away wrath)--and remember that we also have our pet peeves. 

What phrasings, typos, and sentence constructions do you most hate to see in writing? Here are my top three:

My own name misspelled in a supposedly personal message. The dislike of this is no doubt universal, but it's a particular bane to those of us who bear common names with uncommon spellings. The gut reaction is, "You're just like everyone else--too lazy to look closely at the way I write my own name--and then you expect me to believe you're interested in me as an individual."

It's where its should be. All of us are taught in grade school that the possessive its has no apostrophe, yet the business world is full of college graduates who can't remember that simple rule.

That instead of who used to refer to a person. Technically, this isn't an actual error, but it grates on many of us to read "the secretary that typed the memo" instead of "the secretary who typed the memo." Something deep down says that the secretary has been reduced to an "it."

Please submit your own pet peeves as comments. I'd love to get a lively discussion going on this!

Watch Those Links!

If you insist on leaving typos in e-mails, there are three areas, at least, that must be exempt: proper nouns (especially contact names); contact-information numbers (including street addresses); and the URLs of online links. Misspelling someone's name is a guaranteed way to annoy him; so is sending him to the wrong address, brick-and-mortar or electronic.

Online links are particularly tricky because they operate without benefit of human logic. If a link leads to the wrong website, the reader's only option is to return to the original message, manually check the link's URL, and try to figure out where the typo slipped in. Most people won't bother; most others will give the mistake only one chance to be obvious.

If it's important to you that your e-mail recipients follow the links you send them, here are four rules for you to follow.

1. If at all possible, copy the address directly from the page. This leaves no room for error.

2. With a page you last visited some time ago, return to verify it's still up before sending its address. Even if it was right last year, things change quickly online.

3. If no immediate access to the website is available, and the link must be sent immediately, proofread it with extra care. If you spell "California" as "Califronia" and bury that inconspicuously within a long URL, you have only yourself to blame for the results.

4. Be especially careful if linking to a well-known organization. The Internet is full of porn and other unscrupulous sites that mimic the URLs of famous names (e. g., nasa.com vs. the official NASA site, nasa.gov) to lure in careless surfers. Don't aid and abet them.

The Internet is a wonderful thing--but, like all marvels of technology, it must be used according to instructions. Make sure you give people the right instructions.

Goofs and Gaffes

Here's another list of actual quotes that show why "be careful what you say" applies to the written word as well. (Source: Edit Edit Edit (EditEditEdit) on Twitter. Pay that page a visit; there's lots more to chuckle at!)

• "3-year-old teacher needed for pre-school. Experience preferred."
• "Should I have a coma in the middle of this sentence?"
• Sports news headline: "Grandmother of eight makes hole in one."  
• "Chairman Billings asked Board members to muster support from the PTA to support the governor's task force on driving while intoxicated."
• Notice outside public restroom: "Skeptic Tank. No foreign objects."
• "In Pittsburgh they manufacture iron and steal."
• "Blind woman gets new kidney from dad she hasn't seen in years."
• Warning sign: "This door is alarmed."
• "Man Arrested for Possession of Heroine."
• "Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half."
• "Statistics show that teen pregnancy drops off after age 25."
• "We provide the opportunities people with disabilities need to live dignified, fulfilling lies."
• "When you smell an odorless gas, it is probably carbon monoxide."

"Rush" Is a Four-Letter Word

As a professional writer, I have a quick eye for typos, which can make ordinary reading an often annoying and sometimes hilarious experience. Did our grandparents really "have their milk delivered directly form the dairy"? Would you like to "take a peak at all the software options available today"? And how many people actually know the difference between its and it's?

I own books from every decade back to the 1960s, and as far as I can tell, accurate proofreading at major publishers has been in decline since the spell checker was invented. Those spell checkers, created to eliminate typos, seem instead to be giving writers one more excuse for laziness....

Or is it laziness that dismisses the need to proofread personally? Are business owners, working hard to all appearances, turning out sloppy social media writing because they "don't have time" to proofread--and sending brochures to the printer with unnoticed typos because they "don't have a week" to let the text sit so they can come back to it with fresh eyes? Is the underlying reason the same one that causes sleep deprivation and 70-hour work weeks: society has been conditioned to value quantity over quality? Until, of course, one becomes the customer whose order was lost in the crush, or the driver whose car was dented by someone hurrying to meet a delivery schedule. Or the shopper who goes to the wrong address because a harried copywriter mistyped the number. Rush is ultimately the worst enemy of success.

The best defensive weapon is a little planning. I try to allow at least one full hour for preparing a blog or social media post of my own, and a minimum of one week per 500 words when doing a project for someone else. I may never win a prize for greatest number of projects per month, but my work is rarely featured in "The Funniest Writing I've Seen" forums either.

A bestselling book of the early 1990s asked, If You Haven't Got the Time to Do It Right, When Will You Find the Time to Do It Over? Twenty years later, most businesspeople still forget to ask themselves that question. If you apply it to your writing, you'll gain a marked advantage in making a professional impression.