Seen this before?*
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Think spelling isn’t important?
Think again
A new study, reported widely across the news media last week, looks at how spelling mistakes cost businesses money.
Charles Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group said:
I know that industry bemoaning the education system is nothing new but it is becoming more and more of a problem with more companies going online. When you sell or communicate on the internet 99% of the time it is done by the written word.
Duncombe went on to lament the use of spelling mistakes in cover letters and expressed surprise that people even used text speak in their CVs.
So why does this lead to a loss in sales? Why do people make spelling mistakes?
You generally get around 6 seconds to make an impression on a website visitor. If your first paragraph has a litany of spelling mistakes, your company’s credibility is instantly (and possibly irrevocably) damaged. Perhaps even more so if you’re selling a service, rather than a product: it smacks of a slap-dash attitude and suggests that your company is unprofessional.
My top 3 reasons why people make spelling errors:
1. Simple slips of the fingers as we type: (who hasn’t typed ‘teh’ for the, ‘fro’ for ‘for’ or ‘mnay’ for ‘many’?)
2. Dyslexia: many people have a neurological condition which leads them to struggle with spelling words, reading and writing.
3. Getting words confused. These are the most insidious, as they won’t be thrown up by word processing spell-check software. This includes confusing effect/affect, their/they’re/there and more obscure word mix-ups like reign/rein.
However, some people just aren’t good at spelling. This is something that usually can only be improved by reading more (the more you read, the more you see words spelled correctly) or by learning specific words that cause you problems.
If you find spelling and grammar hard yet need to make a good impression, whether it be in an essay, a business proposal or on your website, don’t hesitate to contact me for your proofreading needs.
Like to know more about the benefits of proofreading? Click here to learn more about the science behind why you can’t see your own errors.
For more information about the garbled text at the beginning of the post, please visit this page
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Coronation Street
If you want gritty realism and an excuse to slit your wrists, then head over to Walford, to Albert Square and watch the Mitchells scream at each other to vacate their tavern.
No, not for me are the doof doofs of Eastenders – my soap addiction is reserved for Corrie. The legends who include Bill Roach, (best known as Ken Barlow), celebrated their 50th year in the business in 2010 and proved themselves worthy of the several television awards they’ve won to date (sadly not including 2011). The tram crash, aired in January, cemented Corrie in my mind as a true soap winner. It wasn’t just the sad irony of the menfolk of the street professing their love for their significant others just before they got squashed under the rubble that had me rubbing my hands with glee. This was to be the denouement of the Sally-Kevin-Tyrone love triangle. Sally was finally to hear the truth! The tram crash and its fallout, still being felt today by Tyrone, baby Jack and real dad Kevin was a fitting tribute to Corrie’s 50 year birthday.
Whilst tram crashes aren’t everyday fodder in Coronation St, laughter surely is. That’s where it differs from misery filled ‘Enders. From the bunny-boiler antics of Mary, professing her undying love for Norris amongst the Kabin’s Parma Violets, to the tragi-comedy of John Stape’s disastrous accidental murders, Coronation Street will be my favourite soap for years to come!
The Apprentice
Sergei Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights holds a special pull on my family and I. Once hearing its opening strains, silence descends on the usual rambunctious cacophony of telephone calls, door bells and dog barks. For The Apprentice is on.
Telephones are turned to vibrate, or even off. The television is turned up. The ultimate job interview is on and we become arm-chair business gurus.
Humiliation of deluded egos who deign to call themselves businessmen or women is what we thrive on. It’s the new Victorian freak show. Cringe-worthy statements combine with clever editing to show us what the face of Britain’s brains really looks like: 2010 gave us a man who contends that his first word ‘wasn’t mummy, it was money’ and another who appends ‘The Brand’ to the end of his name. How we laugh.
Their tasks vary from flogging DVDs of ‘experiences’; little more than jolty, grainy videos of skiing or driving, to designing new bottles of alcohol, one of which, in the latest series, resembled a weapon. The candidates’ incompetence, bickering and backstabbing makes for the bulk of the show, until we reach the boardroom, where we meet the real star of the show.
That star is Surallan (or, now known as the less catchy Lord Sugar) whose apparent distress at these bumbling idiots’ results in the boardroom is knicker-wettingly funny. His consternation and ire, when directed in one individual’s direction, leads to their ejection in a black cab, where they curse Lord Sugar’s short-sightedness in firing them.
Nowhere else is the adage ‘it’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part’ more apt than here. For us, it’s the 12 week process, rather than the final winner, that delights.
Embarrassing Bodies
‘Don’t be ashamed; we’re all the same’ goes the voice over. Only, the point is, we’re not all the same. Quite clearly, if the trailers are anything to go by.
Wonky bits, inflamed pustules, growths and protuberances are the bread and butter of this Friday fright-night show. We’re so not the same: I don’t have bits sprouting out of my head, resembling men’s dangly bits, nor do I have a suppurating leg wound that threatens to stink out the surgery.
What surprises me the most is that anyone should ever want to appear on the show. We’re introduced to scores of patients who’ve not revealed their disgusting ailments to anyone, not even their doctors, who’ve hidden their secrets for years… who then peel off their underpants and show the entire Channel 4 demographic their naughty bits. One can only imagine the water-cooler conversations they’ll have once they return to work on Monday morning.
It’s shows like this that make me realise how normal I am. Yes I may have eyebrows that need plucking more than average, or perhaps a slightly wonky left big toe, but I, thankfully, don’t have any of the ailments that are given airtime here. And I thank my lucky stars for it every week.
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The Emperor’s New Clothes? (originally written May 28, 2009)
There can’t be many people who are unaware of Susan Boyle. Type her name into Google and you’ll find 7,270,000 results related to this ‘singing sensation’ (Times Online).
The single, 47 year old from Blackburn has taken the world by storm since her first appearance on Britain’s Got Talent on the 11th of May.
Susan’s rendition of ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ from Les Miserables shocked the studio audience, the judges and viewers at home after she walked on the stage, wiggled her wide, middle-aged hips and proclaimed that she’d ‘never been kissed’.
The introduction pieces to camera just before venturing on stage clearly set up viewers with preconceived ideas; cute kids and young adults with sob stories are almost definitely excellent and get the necessary ‘yeses’, whilst the old and middle-aged are mocked with clownish music and shots of them saying how ‘this is their dream’, telling Ant and Dec how brilliant they are and predicting victory.
Susan’s introduction immediately fell into the ‘sad case’ category as we listened to comedic music playing over shots of her munching a sandwich and standing awkwardly backstage as she waited for her cue. Viewers looked forward to another freak show to laugh at as she walked on the stage in her drab, gold dress, ungroomed eyebrows and bird’s nest hair.
With Simon calling her ‘darling’, we could be forgiven for thinking that this would be another deluded contestant to provide hilarity in between the good acts; after all, she’d declared that she’d ‘make that audience rock’, and as we’ve seen before, those with too much confidence often fall flat on stage.
Picture by Deborah Wilbanks (Creative Commons)
Well, we were wrong. In contrast to her appearances, Susan did have talent indeed. She wowed everyone and was given a standing ovation.
Susan now has a fan site (www.susan-boyle.com) and has been name-checked by Homer Simpson, who marked her as ‘a great singer’; one he’d aspire to. She even appeared across the pond on OprahWinfrey’s show, where she twirled for America.
She’s now hounded by paparazzi and over the last six weeks, the tabloid newspapers have documented her transformation from ‘hairy angel’ to coiffed and made-up woman about town.
So why were people so inspired by Susan? Everyone knows these are hard times; people are tightening their belts and spending less on entertainment and grooming.
Perhaps the two activities of personal grooming and television, when negatively correlated, have produced the Susan Boyle effect? The more time we spend at home, watching reality television, the less time we spend out of the house and the less time we take to dress up and put our slap on. Perhaps we appreciated the every-woman quality of this anti-narcissist Scottish woman and the shock of a beautiful voice resonating through the lungs of a – let’s face it – rotund, hirsute woman, made us realize that there’s more to life than how we look. Don’t judge a book by its cover.
OK, enough of the clichés. Yes, it’s true that Susan Boyle astounded us for all the wrong reasons and that’s not really a good thing, but let’s be realistic. Susan isn’t going to win Britain’s Got Talent, despite the hype, or, in fact, because of it.
Take away the judges, the lights and the screaming audience whose reactions are ordained by crew members holding up signs, take away Ant and Dec and the whole competition, and what are you left with?
Close your eyes and listen to both of Susan’s songs. Try to forget her appearances on the news, in the papers and her mention in The Simpsons.
What do you hear? A mediocre singer, that’s what you hear. Susan’s voice isn’t special and it’s not particularly strong. If Susan Boyle had been on the X-Factor she’d have been out before boot camp. If she’d been an faintly attractive 30 year old, she’d have been kicked out before the semi-finals. When you boil it down (pun fully intended), the only reason she’s still in this competition is because Susan is unattractive.
I don’t expect you to agree with me; after all, everyone is talking about her winning the series and she’s a topic of conversation all over the world. Twitter even recommended her as a search topic in my side-bar on Sunday night. On clicking, I found Twitterers extolling her virtues and posting YouTube videos of her semi-final rendition of ‘Memory’ from Cats.
So why don’t I agree that she’ll win? For the same reasons that she’s become so famous – her looks.
We like our celebrities to fall into one or more of the following categories; they must be beautiful, like Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones, intelligent and talented like Stephen Fry or Judie Dench, or inspirational, like Richard Branson.
Unfortunately, Susan doesn’t fit into any of these. We don’t want our celebrities to be normal, every-man types, we want them to be someone we aspire to. Whether it’s striving to have hair by L’Oreal like Eva Longoria, acting talent like Anthony Hopkins or the charisma of the late Steve Irwin, they have to be exceptional in some way.
Susan isn’t exceptional enough to make money for Syco, Simon Cowell’s record label. After the hype has died down, where does Susan go from there? Who is the target audience for her CD and tour? What kind of shows will she appear on to plug her new album of Elaine Paige covers? I can’t imagine her being a hit on Loose Women or the kind of guest Jonathan Ross would deign to interview on a Friday night. What would they talk about?
Ms Boyle wouldn’t be the first overnight success to be forgotten in 12 months’ time. Where is Steve Brookstein, the first winner of the X-Factor? After 12 weeks he lost his record deal, worth £1m, and now sings on ferries. He got 800,000 more votes than this year’s winner, Alexandra Burke, but he just wasn’t marketable enough. Should Steve’s musical demise be a warning to Susan? I think so.
No, Susan won’t win. Her celebrity brings viewers and promotes both ITV and Britain’s Got Talent, but she’s just not marketable enough.
The very thing that made her famous will be her downfall. I just hope that Susan hasn’t gotten too caught up in the hype herself. After all, Pebbles the cat as an audience just isn’t the same as the Royal family.
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To steal a line from Sir Henry Royce, co-founder of Rolls Royce…..’long after the cost is forgotten, the quality endures’
A few weeks ago I was at a networking meeting. This meeting was thrown together at the last minute and was full of professionally dressed, high-flying businessmen and women.
The first presenter, a young sales executive from Birmingham, stood up and gave an engaging, thought-provoking, five-minute speech about the importance of connecting with customers, instead of selling to them.
Within minutes, she had the audience engrossed and hanging off her every word. I was impressed. This woman had charisma and bags of intelligence. Even her outfit blew us all away.
She meant business. And she was going to get some! After all, you couldn’t fault her style, her message and the way she delivered it. We were already shifting in our seats, mentally queuing to buy from her.
At the end of her presentation, her assistant passed around a handout to accompany the speech.
And that’s where it all went wrong.
Although beautifully presented, with great use of colour and plenty of white space for easy reading, this 4-page document was riddled with spelling and grammar errors. These weren’t even misspellings of difficult words: ‘business’, on the title page was missing one of the final ‘s’s. The name of her biggest customer was spelled incorrectly. Several sentences finished without a point…
I’m sad to say that her speech was forgotten. Her remarks about paying attention to detail when you liaise with customers were laughable.
No one bought from her that day.
The lesson
Proofreading and editing is key to your (and your company’s) credibility. Some of these mistakes would have been picked up by a Word Processor‘s built-in spell check, but most of it wouldn’t.
Fortunately for the professional editor and proofreader, computers don’t have the syntactical knowledge to be able to read a sentence and glean that it is unintelligible.
However, proofreading doesn’t have to be a laborious and tedious chore. You can make it easier by doing simple things like reading out loud, reading the text backwards, or simply printing the words on to a coloured sheet. Reading on a different colour can really help you catch those mistakes.
Or, of course, you can pay a professional to do it for you, in half the time, and with guaranteed results.
Don’t get caught out by the typo your brain skipped.
If you’re in need of a proofreader or someone with a keen eye for detail to edit or rewrite something, get in touch here for a no obligation quote…
Tags: Business, business services, Editing, marketing, misspellings, networking, Professionalism, Proof-reading, Proofreading, sales, Spelling, Whitespace, Word processor, Writing
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