Red flags: Polish your copy to win trust online
Some customers get very het up about this idea of language being ‘correct’. They’ll send nasty emails to your customer services team, leave snarky comments on your social media posts and start drafting complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority the moment your brand messaging veers into slang or a cheeky apostrophe is dropped.
They want less “Yaas kween!” and more “Certainly, madam”.
You don’t need a former copy editor to tell you this behaviour is an over-reaction, but you might be comforted to know that modern linguists are on your side. You can Google ‘prescriptivist versus descriptivist’ if you want to know more about the grammar wars, but, broadly speaking, those who believe language rules ought to reflect common usage have won.
Among other outcomes, it’s now acceptable in most contexts to use ‘literally’ as an intensifier, even if it makes some of us very uncomfortable.
However, this doesn’t mean spelling and grammar rules don’t matter at all.
In old-school daily news, back when we had subeditors, the chief reporter I worked under used to talk about spelling mistakes, grammar mix-ups and other small blips as ‘red flag’ errors. These signal to readers that the writer is sloppy or lacks necessary background knowledge.
Here’s some standard examples of copy errors made by early-career journalists:
- Mistakenly assuming that a man and a woman who present together and share a surname are married.
- Mislabelling an astronomer (scientist) as an astrologist (fortune teller).
- Confusing two similarly-named streets when giving directions to a local landmark.
It’s not the scale of the copy error that’s important, but the fact of its presence.
Copy errors invite the reader to consider: What else did you get wrong? Is this representative of your attention to detail generally? Can I trust you to get the big stuff right?
This concept of a trustworthy, authoritative written voice is important everywhere, but it’s crucial when you’re writing business copy for your website.
This is because scammers use the ‘red flag’ error concept in reverse. They fill scam websites and emails with bad punctuation and clunky sentence construction to make sure only the most vulnerable targets engage with the scam. That way, the scammer won’t spend time nurturing unproductive leads.
This means if you send web copy live with errors in it, your website will activate the ‘Is this a scam?’ part of your customer’s brain. If you don’t allay their suspicions quickly, they’ll flee to a safer-feeling vendor.
When they’re reading your website copy, customers want to find assurance that you’re local and part of their community; that they can trust you with their credit card details and their personal identification data; and that you’ll provide the good or service you’re offering to a high standard of quality.
Spelling, grammar and fact-checking may not explicitly be part of your offering, but getting these right online should be part of your quality-control mechanism. An experienced content creator will do this as a matter of professional pride. If your budget doesn't allow you to outsource web copy, you can still minimise errors by getting the content creator to perform a regular copy audit across your channels.
The bottom line: Don’t let anyone stop you from speaking to your customers in the language that they’re familiar with, but if you’re an astronomer, take care you’re not coming across like an astrologist. Or vice versa.
Sarah Dunn is a B2B content marketing specialist and former award-winning magazine editor. If you’d like help telling your business’s story, you can find her at https://www.sarahdunn.co. Cite “red flags’’ for 5 percent off your first project.