There are loads of ways to annoy me, as my family will attest, but one of the best ways of all is to lead me to your lovely website or blog and then let me see, often in the first sentence, a great big, no nonsense, typo!
It doesn't have to be anything more than a misplaced apostrophe - my favourite so far this week is 'guarantee's' as in 'we offer a range of guarantee's'. They spelled 'guarantee' right, for Heaven's sake! What went wrong with the apostrophe?
But after the apostrophe, it all went downhill from there. Or should I say, 'their'? Because they went on to assure us all that they are famous for 'there customer service'. Did I stay on their website? Did I Hell? I just went elsewhere with my custom - I picked up the phone as a matter of fact, because the written word was really bugging me by then and I thought it was probably time I just used the spoken word instead.
I may have a slightly vested interest in this because I do earn a living creating high quality web content, so I guess I may be just ever so slightly biased. And, worse, when I am not writing web content, I proof read. So even the lightest literature presents me with a challenge; not only does it have to grab my attention, it also has to be totally perfect. I have yet to read any book, even in these days of digital copies, spell checked to the umpteenth degree, that is totally without errors. But I think as long as the publisher appears to have taken reasonable steps, that is enough. The occasional spelling error is okay, a long as it is clearly simply a matter of the typist's fingers having got a little muxed ip; it is ignorance such as 'there' and their', 'were' and 'where' and, my personal favourite and one I saw only the other day, 'throne' and 'thrown' (linked to 'reign' and 'rain' of course) that really gets my dander up.
Well, what a way to start a new blog - having a rant. But ranting is what it is all about when the grammar police are on the march. I shall be tweeting as well - look out for short rantettes on an address to be disclosed shortly.
My husband's favourite, when he worked in life assurance, was a company publication which informed him that "life assurance is sold by a variety of mediums". We had mental pictures of crones gazing into crystal balls and saying "Ooh, I see a dark future - have you thought of a whole-life policy?". This was matched by the experience of visiting the company's Peterborough office one day and discovering that the Company name had been mis-spelled above the door in 2 feet high letters and nobody had noticed.
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