Dotting the ‘I’s and crossing the ‘T’s
In a world full of txtspk and emoticons, does it really matter whether you can spell or have a basic grasp of grammar?
An email invitation to an event about corporate PR that landed in the CDR inbox this week suggests the answer is a resounding yes.
The event was sponsored by a panel of reputable organisations and advertised as the latest thinking in corporate storytelling. Yet the invitation contained a dozen typos from ‘it’s’ instead of ‘its’ to plural verbs attached to single objects and inconsistent capitalisation of job titles.
You could argue that such details are mere trivia: that the event’s content is all that matters. But the poor impact of careless proofreading is contagious. It suggests that if a simple thing like drafting invitation text is wrong, there will be other problems yet to be disclosed.
For undergraduates applying for trainee positions this Spring, it’s worth remembering that a poorly scripted letter or a CV full of greengrocers’ apostrophes will not make it through the first cut.
And one of the first training sessions our account executives attend when they join CDR is how to write in simple business English. We apply a zero tolerance policy on poor grammar and spelling, believing that journalists as well as our clients deserve as near perfect copywriting as possible.
A key learning point at this stage is how to ‘unlearn’ university writing, designed to occupy more space on the page and ‘sound academic’. When clear and speedy communication of information is the object of the exercise, there is no place for ‘furthermores’ or ‘hithertos’.
Yet an even more basic question is why anyone would trust a press release or email from a PR agency that includes fundamental spelling or grammatical errors. Dotting the ‘I’s and crossing the ‘T’s is just as important as it ever was, no matter how many smiley faces you use in your emails.
Corporate Communications, Corporate PR, Events, journalism, Press Release, Writing