I just saw 3 WSO's with major misspellings ... Why?

Here's the thing with that....(I agree spelling is critical) but sometimes you can read your work over and over and just plain miss it.

Ohh Paul.... We have another spell cop on the forum.

What do I hear, is it, is it Mrs Wombat?


I think you are concentrating on the wrong things. You can sit there and make sure your grammar and spelling is perfect while I am out there selling more products before you even get your sales page up.

As long as it's not for a ghostwriter..

Below are just a few of the things I would like to address. I cannot address all the posts that I would like or it would take up another 2 pages.

This is true. That is why it is best to have someone look over it who has experience in the printing field. Someone trained to catch these errors before it goes to print. I was once told that it was not a mistake until it was printed. That is the way all of you should be thinking.

Xavier University's college of Business did a study involving 20,000 "prospective affiliates" of a new business venture. 10,000 were given e-documents with spelling, grammar and layout errors in them while the other 10,000 were given edited, cleaned up copy. Of the 10,000 that got the error filled copy only 50 requested more information. The edited copy got well over 7,000 requests for information. Now, yes, you can be making sales before he has his page up. However, he will make more sales over the long haul. You get a few quick sales while he gets massive long term sales. Which would you want?

That is why it is important to have someone with experience in the field look over your copy before it goes to "bed" as they say in the newspaper business. Besides the spelling errors, there are also grammatical errors and layout errors. Now, anyone good at English or American can check your grammar, but only someone who has experience in the printing business can help with layout issues and errors. That is something that I would not leave to just anyone.

Spell checkers cannot replace a human editor going over your copy. For example, a spell checker would not catch the error in this sentence:

I wore my bough tie to work today.

all a spell checker does is to look at the items between the white spaces and see if they appear in it's dictionary. It would not see bough as being the wrong word to use here. However, a human editor would be able to catch that mistake and fix it before it went to final stage production.

I fully agree with you that spelling mistakes do not mean that the info is rubbish, but it gives the IMPRESSION that the product is rubbish. That IMPRESSION is what the customer or prospective customer is going to take with them. Now, which IMPRESSION would you want your prospects to walk away with?

:::Rushes to go look over WSO::::

Ah you get me all paranoid now.

I agree though, mistakes will happen to the best of writers. Now if there is a CONSISTENT amount of typos throughout an entire WSO...well then I might do some judging.



Jim

For my info products I have two people check for me. For a WSO I check very closely. I love the spell-check from Google or is it FireFox--I can't remember--but it underlines misspellings with a red line and you can right-click to fix it.

But if the spelling is correct it might be tough to catch it since we're so close to it (like weather vs. whether).

Did you PM them? If it was my WSO, hopefully someone would PM me and let me know so I can fix it.

Some of us are mutts though--I was born and raised in Costa Rica to an American Dad and a Costa Rican Mom thus my name is Alan Petersen but first language is Spanish. I didn't move to the U.S. until I was 19 for college. So that's my excuse if anyone finds misspellings on my WSO or posts.

I agree with Kim. Everyone, at least, ought to use some kind of spell checking.

What really makes me wonder is when I see copy with a lot of spelling errors and bad sentence structure from marketers that not only have english as their first language, but also clearly make enough money to hire a professional proof reader. Then my reaction sometimes tend to be;

"Is he/she to greedy to spend a small amount of money on this?"

I somehow agree with seree too. Language isn't everyones strong side. You can be excellent in your main area of interest without being a good writer.

Still a good advice to use a spell checker though.

P.S. My post may contain too long sentences with bad structure. I'm not sure.

Surely what matters is that any writing should be easy to read and easy to understand. If a single sentence claimed to cure cancre, should the reader assume that the writer really meant cancer, or that there is something we've never heard of called cancre? How do you tell?

Just Wombatting
Susan

Spelling mistakes are great. They make you look HUMAN and prone to sinning. they are dead SEXEH!

'Cept for when you want to use words to make money, of course, in which case I agree you had better look out for them. lol

This is only good if hits were the only thing you were concerned with but it is highly unlikely that you will only be interested in someone hitting on a page. You usually want them to take some sort of action once they get there. Them going there to notify you that you misspelled something is not a profit making action in any business since no money trades hands and any attempt to farm their email will be labeled as spam.

Hmmm...

I wonder if we might be seeing a generation gap forming here...

When my folks were in school, both spelling and grammar were hammered into them. By the time I went through (with some of the same teachers), spelling was hammered while the standards for grammar were a little looser.

Not all that long ago, an English teacher stood up in a Toastmasters meeting and flat out stated that they weren't worried about spelling or grammar as long as the students "tried" and they had something to say.

(Does that last line sound familiar after reading the posts in this thread?)

What do all y'all think?

Well, if he is satisfied with just being a millionaire, but I doubt that Donald Trump got to be a billionaire by not sweating the small stuff as you suggest. Now, who do you want to emulate, a measly millionaire or a multi-billionaire? Personally, I want to emulate the multi-billionaire, so I will sweat the small stuff.

Yep.

And it's not going to be the last.

It's a subject that comes up from time to time, and the way this thread has gone is fairly typical.

~Michael

p.s. Just wait until someone starts a new thread on English vs. whatever language they speak in the USA!

Leo, Hey. What can I say. I like tweaking the Wombats of the world. It's something of a hobby for me.

It does serve a useful purpose or two, as well. For one, it makes people think about their communication, in terms of both clarity and style.

A nearly equally useful point is showing the hollowness of the grammatical purist. As a rule, their styles are dry, boring and un-engaging. It is also extremely rare to encounter one who discusses the issue for more than a post or two without leaving a trail of errors.


Paul

I can forgive folks who are not native English speakers. But, if you are from the US, UK, Australia, etc.. and you can't write a cohesive sentence or spell simple words, you lose all creditability in my eyes.

It's not just in the ads for the WSO's, it is the products too. Poor grammer and misspellings just show the seller/creator of the product just does not give a crap - about you, their business, or their reputation.

Why would I want to buy information from someone who comes across as a third grade dropout?

I'm asking this because I don't follow Mike's stuff...

Are his sales pages replete with error as well, or are they more polished? After all, once he has people on his list, he has them on his list.

Just thinking out loud (well, in print).

All the best,
Michael

IMChick, A couple of challenges with those statements.

I don't see anyone saying that people should be sloppy. About anything. If you can show me where anyone in this thread has suggested that you should, I'd like to see it. I surely haven't yet.

The overall message seems to be, "Be more forgiving of small errors, in your own work and that of others."

Frankly, I couldn't care a great deal less if someone decides that they're going to skip an offer because they see two typos and a sentence ending in a preposition in the sales copy.

No, that's not true. I'd rather they skipped the offer. Such people tend to be high maintenance customers, who never actually do anything useful with the products they buy. In short, they waste my time for no useful purpose.

That is not an assumption or prediction, by the way. That's the reality of a lot of years of actual in-the-field experience.

I appreciate it when someone points out edit errors and typos in my work. That's helpful. I just don't want to bother with people for whom the presence of those errors becomes the primary (or only) focus.

People who "demand" perfection are as dangerous to the success of new folks as the family members and friends who say, "You'll never get anywhere with that." I refuse to stand by and let them screw with people's potential like that without being challenged.

These perfectionists are also, in most cases, flaming hypocrites. They preach about spelling with no concern for the value of the content. They pontificate over grammar, and ignore the clarity of the communication. They rant about the rules, and forget the purpose for which those rules were created.

And they'll litter their tirades with violations of the very rules they're preaching as Sacred Writ.

If you're going to demand perfection, you ought to at least make an effort to be clear in the process.

If you're going to bitch about grammar, you ought to at least be able to spell the word.

Flaming hypocrites.

They will tell you all day long about how they think things work, and pay no attention at all to the comments of folks who've "been there, done that." Or they'll cite studies that apply to corporate environments and apply them to markets where corporate thinking and attitudes are actively rejected.

But they LIKE corporations. Those are friendly places for purists. You don't actually have to think, adapt or create. Just follow the rules. The entrepreneurial world is too messy for them.

They refuse to grasp that mistakes sometimes imply "Someone like me." They deny the results of design tests that show, in some markets, that there's truth to the saying, "If it's ugly as hell, it will sell."

That's because they're more interested in rules than in people. I haven't got much time for such thinking.

What some of us are suggesting is balance. A reasonable tolerance that benefits everyone involved.

We're not saying that anything goes. No-one is denying that an excess of errors will hurt sales or comprehension. We're saying that you're not going to achieve perfection, and that you shouldn't let demands for it keep you from accomplishing useful things.

The late Jon Postel had some advice for the operators of email systems that I think is a wonderful rule of thumb for civilized communication in general: "Be conservative in what you generate, and liberal in what you accept."

As for the second part of that quote: You're inverting what would otherwise be a generally valid observation. People who are sloppy thinkers, and who pay little attention to detail, will usually show that in their sales materials. (Assuming they don't hire someone to handle that part of the business for them.)

The reverse is not always true.

The fact that someone has challenges with grammar or spelling has little to do with whether they have valuable knowledge, and solutions to real world problems. It doesn't mean that they can't communicate those solutions in clear and easy to follow ways.

If you want to assume that grammar is a sign of intelligence, go for it. I'll be happy to let you do that. It frees up the targets' time for people who are more concerned with real world results than artificial structures.


Paul