Not bad for a piece of software, but it is no substitute for the kind of professional copy editing that is required to create a serious website that can stand up to the competition. You have to keep in mind that the bigger and more established websites that you are competing with have professional copywriters and copy editors creating and editing their content or ad copy. Yours should be every bit as good, or better, than theirs.

OK, let’s put MS Word to the test using the following sample of web text:

“Our customers consistently rank us higher then any of our competitor’s in customer satisfaction when filling out there questionnaires.”

If you were relying on Microsoft’s Spelling and Grammar Checker to make sure that this statement was written correctly, you would be disappointed to find out that it failed to find three common errors. A copy editor, on the other hand, would correctly remove the apostrophe in “competitor’s” and change “higher then” to “higher than” and “filling out there” to “filling out their.”

Research has shown that websites with grammatical mistakes, incorrect word usage, and misspellings are thought to be less credible than websites without such shortcomings. Stanford University’s three-year study on website credibility found that even the smallest typographical mistakes adversely affected a site’s credibility.

Granted, it is unlikely that very many of the prospective customers looking at your website will be professional copy editors or former college English majors, but the odds are very high that each prospective customer looking at your site will remember a few grammatical rules from school.  What will that customer think if your web text violates the one or two rules that he or she remembers?

Tags: copy editing, grammar, spelling, web content

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Web content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.