If you are looking for copy editing services, you will find some companies offering copy editing services and others offering copyediting services. You might think why, of all people, are copy editors unable to make up their minds on how to spell out the name of their own profession? Kind of ironic, isn’t it? We couldn’t agree more, but we now find ourselves caught in the middle of the seemingly unstoppable trend for compound words to become one.

Let’s take copywriting as an example. It was once copy writing, then became copy-writing, and is now universally written as one word. Copy editing is moving in the same direction. The internet is playing a major role in accelerating this trend because spaces are not allowed between the words forming a website’s domain name.

We have decided not to jump on the “copyediting” bandwagon until this usage becomes a little more common. The American Copy Editors Society, for example, still uses two words. Also, the trend toward one word, while increasingly common, is not universal. Tap dancer is still two words, as is cab driver and truck driver, to give you a few examples. And then, to make matters worse, once we all agree that one word is appropriate, writers begin making the opposite mistake of making them two words again. A good example is bookstore – one word for decades – but often incorrectly written as two words. Thankfully, MS Word does catch this mistake.

If you have taken the time to read this much of our justification for the use of “copy editing” to describe our “copy-editing” services, we would like to let you know that there is a more serious side to this discussion. Words are often in transition, and while they are in transition, we advise our clients to stay with the traditional usage until the transition is nearly complete. Why? Because very few readers will ever fault a writer for using a word in its traditional sense, even when its time has passed, but will very often fault a writer or a copy-editing company for failing to correct what they perceive to be poor grammar when the writer or copy-editing company is simply bowing to current usage.

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?

When building a website, you should never ignore the importance of content. Search engines do not search for sophisticated code or cutting-edge graphics – not that we are denigrating either of these characteristics – we use them both when we build our top-of-the-line websites. Search engines search for words, i.e., content. The more content you have and the more useful it is, the more likely that someone surfing the web will find your site and discover the products and services that you are selling.

Think of it this way, you can use your free time to create content or use your “free” money (savings) to pay for Google and Yahoo ads. Both will bring prospective customers to your site. If you happen to be a good writer, you should use that skill to promote your business. Your competitors will be exploiting their competitive advantages, why shouldn’t you exploit yours?

You can do this by adding more good quality content to each of your website’s pages. But even if you are already a good writer, we cannot in good conscience advise you to add content to your web pages without having a good copy editor review your web content for grammatical mistakes, incorrect word usage, and misspellings.

Why is this so important? Because 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 has to be every bit as good, or better, than theirs if you want prospective customers to have the same confidence in your site that they would have in your competitor’s sites.  

A weblog, on the other hand, allows you to create web content in an informal, conversational manner. It is a great way to build credibility by sharing your knowledge and experience with prospective customers. And you can do a pretty good job of editing your own content with Microsoft’s Spelling and Grammar checker.

Spelling and grammar checkers cannot be the only resource used to check web page content because they fail to catch so many mistakes. A single mistake on a web page can really adversely affect your site’s credibility, but an occasional mistake in a weblog is not really that big a deal – but remember we prefaced this section of our post with the assumption that you are a pretty good a good writer. The important thing is to develop a strategy for beefing up your content footprint on the web.

And now for another shameless plug…you can always give us a call if you would like to integrate a weblog into an existing website or build a new website and make a blog an integral part of the new site.