One thing which really amazes me is how many people use (extremely) ‘relaxed’ language in professional communications. Be it email, memos or data entry notes, whenever you are communicating as a professional, take the time to use proper case, punctuation and spell check. It can be a really poor reflection on yourself if you do not.
I’m not saying you need to be anal retentive about it, but taking a few extra seconds to proof what you are about to put your name on is time well spent. When you are sending personal correspondence, use whatever you like, but when you are ‘on the clock’ represent yourself well.
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I tend to agree. I always see people who do not write correctly as being less educated. Why intentionally give yourself a disadvantage?
I find it very distracting to read text with lots of spelling/grammatical errors.
Unfortunately there is a lot of it about.
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Try also to consider the target audience – some jargon may be OK, but avoid obscure words.
Beware of idiomatic phrases – they can easily be misunderstood by people with different cultural backgrounds.
Have someone else read the draft if possible.
I agree, this is an email reply from a large cellphone company I “was” dealing with.
“no iwill have to do a esn change activate both phone yyou can use the 5400 until t send you the black 8550 i neeed the return tracking # so that i can do yhe evchange Thanks xxxxx”
If she drives and text’s at the same time I’d stay off the road!!
Outlook even makes it easy. Just set it to automatically spell check when sending. That 5 seconds alone is well worth the investment.
Speaking of spell check, there is a good program Spell Check Anywhere (SpellCheckAnywhere.Net) it adds spell check to all programs.
I really hate that’s kind of mistake in spelling/grammatical……
I also agree with the blog.Thanks
I count PCWorld blogs and emails as professional communications, yet I am amazed at the grammatical and spelling errors I encounter. Maybe a bit of proof reading yourselves might not go amiss.
whoops- should have proof read it- i meant PCMech, of course!