Do Bloggers Need to Worry About Grammar?

Today we welcome guest editor, Sigrid Macdonald, who visits us to talk about good blogging and her latest publication, Be Your Own Editor: A Writer's Guide to Perfect Prose.

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If you're a consummate blogger, you may wonder what the point is of polishing your writing skills. The medium is so quick and instantaneous. Updates are frequent and going back to edit a post that you wrote yesterday or last week seems laborious. Is it important? Don't your readers understand how time consuming blogs can be — won't they cut you some slack?

Not necessarily. It depends on the goal of your writing. If you have a personal blog that acts as a diary and is only read by family or friends, don't think twice about what you write and how. Likewise if you are simply chatting with old friends on any social networking site.

However, if you are seeking traffic or if your blog is commercial, then you want your writing to be as good as anything in the newspaper. It's embarrassing to have typos or grammar errors on your blog, and can seriously undermine your readers' confidence in you. You could be brilliant and your posts could be provocative, dense with information, or highly entertaining, but it won't matter if readers are laughing because instead of saying that you wanted to "attach" a JPEG, you said that you wanted to "attack" one.

And if you're selling something, potential buyers will click away in a heartbeat if they see that you don't know the difference between its and it's, or CD's and CDs. On your blog, e-zine, website, e-mail or social networking, you need to watch your language — and I'm not talking about sounding like Eminem or Denis Leary. I'm talking about using proper grammar and spelling.

Is it safe to rely on your spell-check? Not always. It's not 100% accurate like a calculator. It will miss all kinds of homonyms or any word that is spelled properly but misused. And the spell-check in blogger or other blog software is nowhere near as good as that in Microsoft Word. I recommend writing your blog post in Word, spell-checking it there, and then cutting and pasting it into your site. That's a hassle but you're far more likely to have a polished product that way.

I'm a book coach, an author, and an editor; out of the 50 full-length manuscripts that I've edited, I've noticed a common thread.  Most people make the same mistakes.  They write run-on sentences, not knowing when to use semicolons, colons, periods and dashes. (They also don't know the difference between an em dash and an en dash — do you?) They stumble over word usage, becoming confused about when to use loath and loathe, further and farther, or lesser and fewer. Almost everyone misuses apostrophes and puzzles over the plural or the possessive.

My latest book, Be Your Own Editor, addresses all of these issues in an informal style.  It has three pop quizzes so that you can test your knowledge along the way.  It's fun and it's packed with information.  Most importantly, it will prevent you from making the most egregious mistakes that are so easy to do.

Be Your Own Editor is available at Lulu.com as a 6 x 9 paperback for $17.99 or as an e-book for $8.99.  Read more about it at my blog.  Leave me a comment and I'll respond back.  I love to hear from people.  Or send me a friend request on Facebook and read my regular writing tips there.

Here's to writing the right way.