Good Writing Has No Spelling Errors. Spelling matters. Granted that English spelling is irrational, inconsistent and difficult to master, you still need to edit your Public writing – writing for which people will judge you to be sure you’ve spelled everything properly. A surprising number of people are outraged when they encounter misspelled words and they jump to the conclusion that the author is uneducated or ignorant of course, such a judgment isn’t fair – Many intelligent and well – educated people are poor spellers.

But you’re not likely to encounter misspelled words in the published writing of those intelligent people, because they’ll do whatever is necessary to correct the errors in their work before exposing it to outside readers, particularly business people or other professionals, react to poor spelling so negatively that they assume the writer is careless and indifferent to opinion. And they reason, someone who is so careless about spelling is likely to be equally careless about other important details. That is not the impression you want to leave.

What about writing online, you may ask. Hasn’t the casual, easy to use writing tool of email changed attitudes about spelling? In some cases, it probably has. Most of us now write back and forth to friends and family more frequently than we’ve written in years and we’re pretty casual about capitalization and punctuation when we do. Relaxing your standards in such circumstances seldom does any damage. It’s important to remember, though, that the informality – read, sloppiness – of email exchanges doesn’t come from the medium. It comes from the writing situation. You’re writing to people with whom you feel informal – it’s like wearing shorts and a tank top to a picnic.

But when you’re using email for business correspondence your situation is likely to be formal – more like the atmosphere at a business luncheon. In those circumstances, it’s just as important to check the spelling in your email, as it is to clean your fingernails before you meet a business prospect. The same is true when you’re creating a professional web site. Don’t jeopardize the impression you want your site to make by being careless about spelling and punctuation. In Chapter 10 on editing, you’ll find several ways suggested to check on and improve your spelling. Unfortunately you won’t find any shortcuts there, but if you consistently apply the strategies you read about, you can overcome most of your spelling problems.