We talk a lot about how valuable content is to your online marketing and search engine optimization. What we haven’t discussed is the importance of proper grammar and textual formatting of your content. Occurring naturally for us, as content marketers, checking grammar and context is like second nature as we try to produce the most informative and useful posts we can. For the everyday business owner trying to pump out some content now and then, proofreading and grammar checking isn’t at the top of their massive to-do list when getting the content out is a great accomplishment in itself.
Sadly, as our society has evolved, our grammar and vocabulary has been shortened and significantly limited. With texting, social media, blogging, online forums, slang, auto correct and continuous acronyms all created to fit our fast past, no-time kind of world, we’ve adapted to a lesser quality way of communicating through technology. With the advancement of things like Urban Dictionary, SMS Language and Emoji’s, we’re able to have entire conversations with abbreviations and pictures, taking less time to type and read while still getting the message out loud and clear. While helpful in some formats, these changes in our communication have allowed us to lack in the “formal” narrative process. This casual language, in a sense, has dumbed down our ability to write to English standards correctly. As a fault, we find ourselves including texting language in formal settings when not appropriate and this can have a advers effect when producing proper content marketing.
What can you do to ensure you are generating grammatically correct content?
Take your time
Set appropriate time aside to create your content. Don’t rush; the more rushed, the more mistakes can happen. Start it, save it, come back to it. Give it time to know what you are writing and how you are writing it.
Proofread
Check and double check what you are writing. Have another person read it as well to ensure its readability. They may find mistakes that you’ve missed or raised questions that should have been answered in the article. Consider each suggestion carefully and adjust your content accordingly.
Broaden your vocabulary
If you realize you’re repeating the same words, look up synonyms and find other ways of writing what you want to share. Repeating the same language can be mundane and can cause confusion with SEO if not caught. Before using other terms, make sure you understand their true meaning and that it fits in the context. We aren’t saying you have to use “big words” to sound more “sophisticated”. We are saying to expand your vocabulary and the terminology in your writing to have a balanced way of generating quality content that you, and the reader, understand. Don’t jump on the thesaurus bandwagon and toss out the first-word suggestion. Using more significant words, or more complicated sounded words, just to seem smarter can have the opposite influence if those words really aren’t fitting what you are trying to describe.
Use writing tools
Starting with the basic, write your content in a word processing tool such as Microsoft Word. Programs like this have been developed for the sole purpose of successfully executing any writing needs in the proper format. Utilizing this tool will guide you in your writing process, catching grammatical errors along the way and providing best practice recommendations to improve and correct those errors. Other online tools, like Grammarly, will assist you while composing content in any format from emails to social media and blogging. Our team has taken full advantage of using Grammarly in our daily routine. It has been a tremendous help in ensuring our daily communications, from client tasks to internal messaging, are sent with the comfort of having a “second eye” catching any potential errors or supplemented options.
Utilizing these 4 simple steps will help guide you to create quality content that makes you proud. Producing comprehensible content will open more sharing and liking possibilities with the audience you are trying to reach. Take your time to warrant what you are sharing reflects the level of intelligence backing it.
