Poor grammar on websites scares away 59% of customers. This is what you can do about it
28.09.20 09:00 AM By Lala
By Jim James,
Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of the SPEAK|pr Podcast
Today, I’m going to talk about grammar and its impact on your business. If you’re forgetting the basics when it comes to grammar, the good news for you is that there are tools that can help you check and correct your grammar, and I’m going to share with you examples we can all use on how to get better grammar.
A study in 2013 in the UK showed that 59% of Britons would not use a company that had obvious grammar or spelling mistakes on its website or in its marketing materials, and that 82% would not use a company that had not correctly translated its material into English. Definitely, if we’ve got material, we need to think about making sure the grammar is right even if we’re not writers. I was thinking about this, because my wife who is from Shanghai has just started a business, and she asked me to look over her website. She started an Etsy site, and she’s importing products from China. In fact, she is working on a company called Teapots Oriental. It’s a beautiful website. Etsy does a wonderful job, and she’s been hard at work translating the Mandarin descriptions of her products into English, and she asked me what I thought. I couldn’t help but to point out one or two grammatical errors which, of course, didn’t go down well. I was asked to give a positive opinion, not necessarily an honest one. Quickly, I withdrew from the situation. At the same time, I introduced her to a service called Grammarly.
Grammarly was founded in 2009 by Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn, and it has now become the staple for many companies, including my own, for grammar checking. Alex has an MBA from the University of Toronto, and prior to that, from the Vienna school in Austria, while Max has an MBA from Vanderbilt, but is originally from the Ukraine and has a degree from the University of Kiev. These two gentlemen have set up a business, which can be embedded onto your browser and computer. This works for any text written in English, and what it does is it removes the most basic of errors in our text. It can also, though, go further and deeper depending on the package that we select. The most basic one can be added onto a browser, and it can check the tone of a message before you hit send. It even has little icons to say whether what you’ve written has a positive, negative, or neutral tone, which is quite nice. It also has features where it can, for example, on a tablet or phone, integrate with all the other apps that we use, which means that the old problem of typing and having bad grammar can be eradicated. As you can tell, Grammarly checks and offers alternatives to the way that we’ve written something. So, if we’re using Gmail or Twitter, there’s no need anymore to cut and paste it into the application. It automatically does it. This is new on Grammarly.
There’s a free version, which I’ve been using, and which my wife is also now using to great effect, but there are also features available for business customers. This, I thought, was very interesting, because one of the issues that I’ve faced is that companies will have their own style guides in the same way that they will have their own color and design guides when it comes to logos, for instance. Companies will have a certain way of, for example, capitalizing their company name or how they write a product, if it’s in uppercase or lowercase. In the past, as I’ve worked with clients around the world, this has led to many a rewrite of words in press releases, especially as software will try and automatically correct words. Now, Grammarly for Business enables a company to standardize text, sentences, and certain expressions, and it can offer customized and real-time writing suggestions to employees. Interestingly enough, with the Business and the Premium edition, it’s even checking for elements like plagiarism, formality, and inclusive language, which I understand now in America is becoming really an issue.
I’ve realized as well that, for many companies that are working across borders, you can find yourself with different people in different countries writing. I certainly find this when mainland Chinese are accommodating their non-Mandarin speaking partners, clients, and teammates. They’re writing in their own vernacular, and sometimes things get lost in translation. Now, we can use Grammarly to help with the internal communications as well as the external communications. One of the issues that we face, especially in business-to-business communications, is that technology often has its own terminology, and how a company addresses a certain phrase or a certain business problem can sometimes be proprietary to that company, because maybe it owns patents as a particular way of expressing the way they approach a problem.
With Grammarly Business, it’s possible to actually create what in effect becomes a lexicon for the company that’s shared via the web with all the members of the company around the world. This ensures that company names, product names, and trademark names are spelled properly and capitalized properly. This works on Gmail, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and even on Zendesk, Slack, and Zoho Desk. In other words, it’s not just in the word processor, because all of us are taking the words that we’re writing and we’re self-publishing them internally across groups to meetings, as well as publishing them externally, and we’re sharing them with our partners. So, this seems to be a pretty amazing opportunity to, first of all, correct grammar problems, but secondly, to standardize them across a business and its units.
Photo from Grammarly
How much does Grammarly cost? The Business package for Grammarly starts at $12.50 a month per team member with a minimum of three and a maximum of 149 members. I’d say that’s not a big price to pay for having consistency of grammar. And as we said at the very beginning, if 59% of customers will be scared away by poor grammar, then that has to be a good investment. Grammarly also has a Free package, which is the one I’m using. They offer a Premium package as well, which is $11.66 a month.
There’s another one called Ginger which just costs $7.49 a month, and it’s a great Grammarly alternative, but it doesn’t have features like the plagiarism tool which helps online publishers fight against duplication, because of course, you don’t someone copying your content and not crediting it to you. Ginger is available on the App Store. It has a 4.4 star rating, but there are only seven ratings. While it may seem like a reduced package, for many people, it might just do the job.
Photo from Ginger
There is another one called the ProWritingAid, and the basic subscription costs $20 per month, the year subscription is $79, while the lifetime subscription is $299. Remember, you may not getting features like the plagiarism, the formality, and inclusive language. It’s more on whether you’ve got your spelling and your syntax right. There are about a dozen other companies that are offering AI-assisted technologies for helping us to write more efficient and more effective communications. All of these could be very, very helpful for writing, for example, press releases, especially if you’re not a great writer or lack confidence in your writing skills. On LinkedIn, I have even noticed some people writing either hurriedly or without giving it to a second set of eyes, and I’ve also noticed some senior people writing posts that are plainly poorly written.
Photo from ProWritingAid (Chrome Web Store)
This leads us to the issue of why 59% of people don’t trust a company or a person that writes incorrectly. It’s slightly judgmental, because somebody could be perfectly well educated and well qualified to do a job, but might just not be good at spelling. They could be dyslexic, as so many great entrepreneurs have been. But considering how specific the English language is, it’s actually easy to misinterpret if someone’s miswritten something, as there could be multiple meanings to what someone is saying. Ultimately, it comes down to trust. It may be a judgement, whether we would work with that dentist, that surgeon, or that accountant that writes things incorrectly, because we may see them as not paying attention to detail or being educated. That’s one part of it, but I suppose the other part of it is our sense that if this person is not taking full account of how to write about something, what are they going to do when it comes to things like the contracts, the product specs, or the features? Do they pay attention? It’s a question, I suppose, as to whether they can not only write properly but paid attention as well to what they’re writing. In other words, it may just be that they’re being sloppy, and this may be the fundamental underlying issue why people don’t trust companies that are not writing accurately.
With all the technology that’s available, it’s quite possible to use a product like Grammarly for free, like my wife is doing for her Etsy account and frankly, it’s saving me a lot of domestic grief. We can also use this on our browsers or on our desktops. It may prove to worth the investment if you’re writing across a team and especially if you’re writing across geographies. Just looking at social media and the volume of content that we now write, it’s extremely easy to get it wrong, and because spell checkers, and for me anyway, the autofill will often write things that I actually didn’t mean to write, so sometimes the computer is interfering with what I’ve written. And though Grammarly is not perfect, it at least creates another checker. In the old days, we would have a second person to read our copy before we sent it. Certainly, that was the case in the old days back in the mid-90s when we wrote a press release. We’d always have a second person to read it, but that’s not always possible now for issues of time and money.
Technology is coming to our aid once again, and we have to make sure that what we write is well-written, attractive, search engine-friendly, and grammatically correct. What I will say about search engines is that if our grammar and/or our spelling is incorrect, then the search engines will not find us. So, take time to write. Enjoy it. Think about the value of checking it before you hit publish on anything that you write, whether it’s on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, an email. Take the time to make sure that you’re representing yourself, your company, and your team with the best possible grammar.
This article is based on a transcript from my Podcast SPEAK|pr, you can listen here.
