Hey, What’s That On Your Shirt ….

Spinach in your teeth. A stain on your top. An eye booger – things you can only hope that someone will point out so that you can take care of it.

These are the equivalent of typos in your subject lines, headings, and general content. 

We rely on our closest friends to tell us everything, but they can only tell us what they see and what they know. And good friends do not often good editors make.

In this age of the internet, where we can edit our posts on some social media platforms, it’s so freaking easy to forget that “send” means “sent” when it comes to email newsletters, blogs, and heaven forbid – physical print materials. When you aren’t looking at your content as your readers do, you don’t see what they see.

So when you are marketing yourself and your business through written communication your audience can get distracted by the smallest things. We make judgments and base our first impressions on what hits us first. Don’t let it be an egregious typo like one of these:

• Extra capitals, no capitals, irregular capitals. Be proper with your nouns and save the casual for your pronouns.

• Basic misspellings or incorrect use of homonyms can turn content into a whole different story. Make sure you’re telling the right one.

• Misplaced or missing words can have your reader wondering if you put a little moonshine in your coffee. They need full sentences, not word games.

Your reader should not be distracted by proofreading your content. Nor should they be looking up words that are confusing because of flawed sentence structure. 

But how do you know? You’ve read through it 3 times and it sounds awesome. And it is – it’s creative and thought-provoking, persuasive and enticing. The blinding light of successful storytelling may block you from seeing any mistakes.

The issue is you can’t always access a mirror to check your appearance, but you can hire a copywriter to give your content the once-over before you hit send.

Want me to point out the spinach in your copy discreetly before anyone else sees it? Let’s chat.