Blogging is fast, informal and easy to do. Spelling, grammar and factual errors happen – but do they make a material impact on the success of a blogger? A small but interesting survey run by crowdsourced copy editing service GooseGrade concludes that they do.
Approximately 200 respondents told GooseGrade that while blogs aren’t a major source of news for most of them, they often find errors on blogs and that makes them less likely to share the content they find there with other readers. While unsurprising, these numbers are a good illustration of just how much things have changed in media – or not.
The Details
The company asked a demographically diverse group of respondents on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website to fill out the survey and published the results today on the GooseGrade company blog. The bulk of respondents spent some time reading blogs but were people who remained dependent on “mainstream sources” for most of their news.
We thought that the most interesting findings were these:
- Spelling and grammatical errors harmed a reader’s opinion of a blog, their willingness to spend time on the site and to share its content nearly as much as perceived factual errors did.
- Respondents believe that spelling, grammar and factual errors on blogs are common. Only 20% of respondents said that it was “not often” or “never” that they found such errors.
Good writing is a rare skill, though it often goes unnoticed when it produces easily read text. Bad writing is very, very common and if you’re someone who finds it distracting – you’re not alone. Many of us fluctuate somewhere in between, but this study is another reminder that it’s not a casual matter if we wish to communicate effectively. If you’re response is that this study is over exagerating it’s conclusions – then your probly not paying attention. (Ha!)
Below are a few of the charts, you can see the rest on the GooseGrade blog. The lesson here? It seems pretty clear. We bloggers are harming our own credibility and traffic with our inattention to details, not just in the facts, but in the basics of our writing. Let’s do better!
Well Spelled Charts
