We all make jokes about the “Grammar Police” coming out in force to attack us every time we publish a blog post with a typo, no matter how tiny. We talk about these “Grammar Police” as though they’re nothing more than a nuisance – too concerned with trivial details to pay attention to the important information we’re trying to convey, but here’s the thing:
They’re not trivial.
In fact, even small typos can have a big impact on the conversion rate of your content, so we’re going to go over the reasons why you need to copyedit your content before hitting that “publish” button.
Table of Contents
- Readability
- Copyediting vs Proofreading
- Get a Professional Copyeditor
- How to Copyedit Your Own Content
- Is It Persuasive?
- Website Content vs Social Media Posts
- How to Deal with the Grammar Police
Readability
When it comes to content that converts leads into sales, one thing we always come back to is readability. Obviously, people have to be able to read your content in order to be persuaded by it, but it’s more than just stringing together a series of symbols that collectively make up words we then use to form sentences, then paragraphs, etc. Your content has to be so easy to read that people are able to breeze through it (even skim, as many people do) and still get the message.
If your content is too complicated, contains too much jargon, or jumps from topic to topic without any segue, you’re making it difficult for readers to consume your content and they’ll click away without taking the next step in the buyer journey.
The same can be said of even small typos.
Let’s say you’re an attorney writing a blog post about the importance of acquiring a divorce lawyer who will represent your interests in a divorce case, but instead of writing “lawyer,” you write “laywer”. Not a big deal, right?
While it’s true that your readers are sure to be able to tell what you meant, that’s not the point. The point is that you made one small error that will pull them out of the story you’re trying to tell.
No, it’s not the end of the world if your readers get a giggle out of a small mistake you made, but consider what that giggle means – it means they’re no longer paying attention to what you’re trying to say. Humans are easily distracted creatures that have been primed to notice things that don’t belong, so when we see a typo that converts a well-known word into another word that doesn’t exist in our language, our attention is very quickly diverted to figuring out the different ways that new word could be pronounced. Maybe we read it aloud to someone sitting near us.
And that’s it. You’ve lost them.
They may or may not continue reading after they’ve had their fun, but even if they do read on, at least part of their attention remains on the misspelled word and you can bet they’re looking for more mistakes. And that’s the best-case scenario.
The worst-case scenario is that readers will click away as soon as they see a typo, and that happens more often than you might think.
Copyediting vs Proofreading
In the above example, we talked about a typo that could have been fixed with proofreading, rather than copyediting, although both are equally important.
When people talk about making sure your content has no typos or grammatical errors, they’re talking about proofreading.
When people talk about making sure your content flows easily from one subject to another and is easily digestible, they’re talking about copyediting. Just like a typo can pull your reader out of the message you’re trying to convey, jumping from one point to another without a relevant segue can also make it hard for your readers to follow what you’re trying to say, resulting in a higher bounce rate, reduced conversions, and reduced shares of your content.
When you hire a professional editor, most will ask if you want copyediting or proofreading, and those two services are usually offered at different prices. In most cases, copyediting happens shortly after the first draft has been finished, then it’s sent back to the writer to make the content more clear and concise. Only after it has been rewritten and everyone involved agrees on the content should it go in for proofreading, which is the final step before publication.
Now that we’ve gone over why your content needs copyediting before you publish it, let’s talk about the process of copyediting your content:
Get a Professional Copyeditor
Ideally, you should hire a professional copyeditor to look over your content before you publish it. Not only is a professional copyeditor likely to have all the rules of grammar memorized, but they can look at your content with fresh eyes. When you’re the one who wrote the content, it’s easy for you to skim over your mistakes because you know what you meant to write. By contrast, when someone who has no preconceived notions on the topic reads your content, their eyes are more likely to be caught by mistakes both large and small.
As discussed above, copyediting is different from proofreading, and it’s important to clarify what you want when hiring a professional editor. Whether you want a general copyeditor who works with all kinds of industries, or one who is familiar with your specific industry will depend on your audience. If you’re in the B2C space, you’ll want someone who offers general copyediting services to a wide variety of audiences because they’ll be able to tell you if your content makes sense to the average reader. When you’re constantly immersed in the world of your business, it can be easy to forget that not everyone is familiar with the jargon of your particular industry.
If, on the other hand, you’re in the B2B space, especially if you’re selling something very technical, you might want a copyeditor who is familiar with that space because that way they’ll be sure to know that your audience is going to get all the highly technical terms you use. They’ll also be more likely to understand the point of view of your customers and what they’re looking for when comparing prices and benefits.
How to Copyedit Your Own Content
Let’s say you decide not to hire a copyeditor. Sometimes it’s just not in the budget and we have to shoestring it until we can come up with the funds. In that case, here’s what else you can do:
Leave It Alone
Once you’ve written your rough draft, the most important thing you can do is put it away for a while. The longer the better. Don’t look at it, or even think about it for at least 24 hours, although several days to a week is ideal. The longer you wait to come back to it, the better able you’ll be to spot errors and inconsistencies.
Read It Out Loud
You can do this without anyone else in the room, if that’s what makes you comfortable. The idea is not to practice giving a speech, but to force yourself to hear your words out loud, which gives you an entirely new perspective on the content. It allows you to be able to hear repetitions and inconsistencies you might have missed when you were reading it silently to yourself.
Reading something out loud also forces you to slow down (we generally read about twice as fast as we speak), making it more likely you’ll catch small errors and typos.
Change the Font
You’d be surprised what an impact changing the font can have. Even though it’s the same content, it looks totally new, which can wake up your brain and help you spot inconsistencies and misspellings you might have missed on earlier readings.
If you’re writing your blog post directly in the back end of your website, you can use the “preview” feature to see how your blog post would look when published on your site, which is another way to get a fresh perspective on your content.
Use Tools
Obviously, tools like spellcheck and Grammarly can go a long way towards helping you get your content on the right track, especially if spelling and grammar aren’t your strong suits, but don’t rely on them to the exclusion of the human eye. Those tools can often miss contextual cues that would tell a human that word doesn’t belong there, or you’ve used the same word several times in one paragraph.
Get Free Help
If you can’t afford a professional copyeditor, but you have a business partner, or your spouse is willing to help you out every now and then, have them act as your copyeditor. The key is to get someone who has not written the content to look it over because they’ll be able to spot things you missed.
Again, whether your beta reader should be someone inside your industry or outside of it will depend on the kind of industry you’re in. If you’re in the B2B space, you might want your business partner or an employee to look over your content for you. If you’re in the B2C space, you might want a spouse or a friend to look it over to make sure it doesn’t have too much jargon that confuses them and/or pulls their attention away from the message you’re trying to convey.
Is It Persuasive?
Whether your beta readers are volunteers or professional, don’t forget to have them tell you if your content is persuasive. Would they buy your product/service? Don’t badger your copyeditor into becoming a customer, but ask for their honest feedback. If they could be a potential customer, but your content isn’t convincing them, then you still have work to do. It won’t matter if your grammar is perfect if the content isn’t persuasive.
Website Content vs Social Media Posts
While most people agree that the grammar and spelling in your blog posts and website landing pages need to be impeccable, there is some debate regarding whether it’s as important for social media posts to be free of such errors.
On the one hand, social media has given rise to shorthand and the use of things like “2” in place of “to”, and as long as your audience is familiar with that shorthand, there’s no reason not to use it in your social media posts (although that’s probably best left to sites like Twitter and Instagram, rather than LinkedIn, which tends to have a more professional audience).
But what about genuine mistakes, such as misspelled words that don’t make any sense, or leaving words out? Does that have an effect on your brand’s social media presence?
While some people argue that spelling and grammar don’t matter on social media, we disagree. Everything your brand does impacts how it’s viewed, and that includes social media. Posts with typos and grammatical errors get fewer shares than error-free posts, and that can have a big impact on your visibility.
The good news is that copyediting social media posts doesn’t take nearly as long as copyediting blog posts, website landing pages, or newsletters. You can usually get away with just reading through each post before you hit “publish” or “schedule” to check for any missed words or misspellings.
The other good news is that social media posts don’t last nearly as long as blog posts or website landing pages. After a few hours, maybe a few days, they get lost in all the other content and it becomes less and less likely anyone will see it.
How to Deal with the “Grammar Police”
Despite our best efforts, we all make mistakes from time to time, and the “Grammar Police” will let you know about it as soon as you start getting some traffic to your website. So, how should you handle it when they do?
It’s key to remember that the “Grammar Police” aren’t just a nuisance – they could be potential customers. After all, they found your site somehow. So you should handle them the way you would handle any customer that pointed out a potential issue with your product or service. Rather than ignoring them (tempting as that may be), thank them for pointing it out and make the necessary corrections. It shows you care about your brand and how it comes off to online viewers, and that can only gain you points in their estimation.
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If you’re ready to hire a professional copyeditor to make sure your content is the best it can be, we’re here to help.
