As a guest on the “Friends with Kevin Radio Show,” I had the opportunity to discuss why a business or brand should care about copyediting with host Kevin Willett. In our short, approximately ten-minute segment, we dove into the copyediting chaos that can wreak havoc on a brand’s message and overall presentation.

Here is a key takeaway about typos and a link to our talk…

Why Should Your Brand Care About Copyediting?

The digital age is, arguably, an unkind one… in part because of its unforgivably fast pace. As business owners, we are all in a rush to keep our online presence updated, or risk looking as though we’re not up to the minute on our own marketing initiatives. No matter your business, maintaining a consistently updated online presence is crucial to keeping your audience informed, educated, and, if at all possible, entertained about the work you do.

Willett started our interview with the all-too-familiar copywriting trouble: typos. No matter how careful you think you are when it comes to copywriting, the need for speed combined with business tasks competing for our time lead to mistakes on the page. While some mistakes are easy to overlook and likely will be by the majority of your readers, ie. using it’s versus its, obvious misspellings glare back at your audience and send the wrong message.

However untrue it might be, the message essentially screams: I couldn’t be bothered to reread my work or have this edited before hitting post, send, publish, whatever. That level of carelessness, right or wrong, sends a message that your business takes a similar approach when it comes to delivering your specific service or product.

Research on Typos Emphasizes the Importance of Copyediting

Yes, there is research on typos.

Consider the study done by psychologists Jane Vignovic and Lori Foster Thompson at North Carolina State University, who asked students to vet a possible candidate exclusively via email message. Their findings showed that the “students who read the email messages perceived the writer to be less conscientious, intelligent and trustworthy when the message contained many grammatical errors, compared to the same message without any errors.”

This was reported by Salon.com in an article entitled, Those little typos and grammar errors in your emails make a big impression. Clearly. Imagine the impression the authors of this post made on me when the heading directly below the title contained a typo. Check it out:

Research indicates readers judge us harshly on our miscues, particularly when they crop up in a short messages

Yep, drop the “a” or the “s,” in order to better establish your authority on the subject of typos. But, back to the study for a moment… these findings focus on college students determining a how conscientious, intelligent, and trustworthy a candidate was based entirely on the existence or lack of typos in an email. Would your brand’s copy, whether on your website, blog, social media, or emails, hold up to that type of scrutiny from colleagues and clients?

Why take the chance when you can hire a professional copywriter to ensure that the meaning of your brand’s message resonates with clarity, correctly? Drop me a line and let me know how I can help get the word out about your business, without you worrying about the writing.

Tune in to the show if you’d like to hear more of my conversation with Kevin…