Proofreading problems, fuzzy thinking, and rambling sentences undermine our readers’ trust in our message.
Whenever you write, your credibility is on the line. Your readers assess your trustworthiness, intelligence, competence, and attention to detail with every word you compose. You might have a great product or service, but if your messaging seems untrustworthy, you jeopardize your success.
What can damage your credibility? The first things people see are problems such as grammar, punctuation, spelling, and formatting. These mistakes can trigger your reader to delete your message before reading it through. Someone recently sent me a marketing message listing the “benifits” of his service. Maybe his service did have many benefits, but I will never see them because the moment I saw that misspelled word, I assumed he did not value quality control.
Assuming you get past the most obvious issues, you may face even more hazardous thinking difficulties such as failing to address the real issue, not clarifying the goal of the document, or not focusing on the reader’s needs. Customer service and sales communications often fall short because they do not accurately pinpoint the topics that matter to their customers.
Add to that writing blunders of rambling, interminable sentences, and confusing the reader, and you have a trifecta of failures that can capsize credibility and kill communication.
Practical problems
Every message operates at multiple levels. Your literal meaning says one thing, but just as posture and clothing speak about a person’s role and capabilities, the non-content messages in your document speak volumes about who you are. Just as showing up for an important business appointment with ketchup on your shirt damages your image, proofreading and grammar errors detract from the message you’re trying to convey.
Do proofreading errors matter?
People sometimes tell me, “It doesn’t matter if I have grammar and punctuation errors–my readers know what I mean.” Yes, they can usually figure out your literal meaning. Still, when they see your “body language” errors, they are learning something more important: that you either do not care about details, do not check your work before sending it, or are ignorant of the English language. Can you afford to have people in your business life draw these conclusions?
Proofreading gaffes are damaging because people generalize: They figure, if you are careless about one thing, you are careless about others. I trained the audit department of a large hotel chain recently. I told them that if an email from the audit department has a typo, the guest receiving it may worry there will be hair on their pillow the next time they visit the hotel.
Thinking errors undermine your authority
As damaging as proofreading errors are, they pale in comparison to errors in thought, such as not considering why you are writing, failing to address the real issue, and not focusing on the reader. Someone once asked me to design a writing training for her team, lamenting, “They know how to write–they just don’t know what to write about!” Her team was studiously spewing out sentences that did not move the business forward because they did not know which points were salient to the matter at hand. Clients quickly tire of messages that don’t hone in on their true concerns.
If we reflect on our goals for writing and remember that, to reach our goal, we need to touch the mind of our reader, we are likely to gain that person’s trust in our message.
Rambling leads to ruin
Once you have the practical elements down and think through your message, you must compose it straightforwardly. This means getting to the point promptly, writing sentences whose average length is around 20 words, and avoiding acronyms and jargon that might confuse your reader. As I write in my book, Get to the Point!, straightforward writing makes for easy reading. In an era of goldfinch-size attention spans, brevity and focus matter more than ever.
Building your credibility with every message
Why do you smooth out your shirt before a meeting or a Zoom call? Probably because you want the other people in the meeting to take you seriously and give weight to your ideas. When you write, you lack the advantages of visual appeal and body language: All you have are your words, and you need to make them right. That means:
- Proofreading your work before you send it.
- Rereading to ensure that your purpose is clear and that you have addressed the issues that are both salient to you and relevant to your reader.
- Editing your document so that your language is crisp and clear.
Notice that all these suggestions require you to resist the urge to send every document the moment you finish composing it. Having the patience to reread and revise every message will pay off when your readers reward you with their trust.