by Will Rotondi
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a hypocrite when it comes to spelling errors: those that I catch I find to be eyesores, yet I know I’ve made plenty of them in my time (whether or not they were caught). Maybe it’s like swearing: most of us are told at a young age what “bad words” we shouldn’t say, and the same is the case when it comes to learning how to write in school.
We have to keep that professional image, after all.
That’s all well and good if you have the time to be that technical. The problem is, time isn’t always on your side. Drafting up content comes in many forms these days, from online posts like this to the emails that you’re sending. (And people write a lot of emails, chockfull of spelling and grammatical mistakes, as well as stream-of-consciousness writing that only Faulkner might be able to understand.)
Can you be expected to be grammatically correct in all of this corespondence? No.
Does that make you a bad person? No.
Will people judge you for them? Some might, but others—especially those who spend a lot of time using electronic media—won’t be terribly bothered by it, according to one study. That group includes your prospects. Even if they do recognize that occasional typo, they’ll take it as a sign that you’re a real person, not an email blast that was polished four times over before getting sent.
Yes, you need to draft up relevant messages that will intrigue your prospects to learn more about you. But you also need to send this messaging out to them on a consistent basis, so that you continue to stay on their minds.
Don’t sacrifice that consistency for the sake of being perfect. There’s no guarantee that a single email will be opened. It could be the second, or third, or twentieth one down the line that does the trick: it comes at the right time, addresses the right need, and gets opened by the right audience.
If you found the intentional typo in this message, let me know if and how it affected your opinion.
