To err is human, to forgive is divine — but to not use spell check? Well, that’s just crazy. Listen we’ve talked in these pages more than once about the humanity of blog creation and blog marketing. Every once in a while we all screw up, we spell things wrong, we botch the facts. And it’s okay. But as marketers and professional copywriters, it is sort of our duty to keep that kind of thing to a minimum. We expect professional chefs to know how to make an over-easy egg and we are ready to take him to the rack if that yolk is harder than a rock. Therefore, our clients expect us to be able to spell and to avoid grammatical nightmares as much as possible. So the three-peat of spelling errors churned out by the Mitt Romney for President campaign over the last week has us annoyed, befuddled and concerned.
To recap, last week the Romney camp released an app with “Amercia” comically spelled, much to the delight of comedians everywhere. This week, Team Romney followed that gem up with one Facebook post with two spelling errors — “offical” and “sneak-peak.” What the heck is going on over there? This guy wants to make decisions about our country’s educational system and we get treated to sloppy editing and crappy content? Not okay. Trust us, this isn’t a party lines thing. This is a quality and professionalism problem. Ask any PR person who came up in the ranks of the pre-Twitter years and they’ll undoubtedly tell you tales of terror about triple checking documents before they went out to clients. Journalism students, ad industry flunkies and even junior Hollywood writers all have similar stories. Checking the quality of our content used to be a priority and the sheer fact that colossal spelling mistakes would sail past an entire staff of highly-educated people is a cause for concern. Our blogs, tweets and marketing materials are how people form opinions about our brand. When we play the social media game and the online marketing game, we need to go back to triple checking our work, even if that means slowing down. At the very least, we can turn on the spell check on our laptops to check while we post.
But, readers, you tell us: Is the Romney spellpocalypse a sign of impending global sloppiness? Or has our instant information era simply given way to more errors? And while we’re at it, feel free to share some of your favorite spelling disasters in the comments section below!
Leave a Reply