Does speling matter?

It wasn’t long ago that I expressed my dismay and disapproval of sloppy writing on Facebook, blogs, tweets and so on.

“Loosen up, Kris,” a colleague told me. “It’s a different media, with different conventions.”

The idea with social media is to shout out your message, quick and dirty as it may be. I’ve seen the light: grammar and spelling can be a straightjacket to expressive social media. Someone who seems to be light years from this revelation is the employer who did not hire a person because they had too many spelling errors on Facebook. It’s only a Facebook update, for crying out loud, not a job application! It’s ironic that the Facebook group Proper Spelling & Grammar has more than 5,200 fans.

Social media can be a marketing or professional networking tool, but it doesn’t have to be. And thereby, your writing on these channels should be correct, but doesn’t have to be. The important thing is that the point of your message isn’t lost due to poor language, exclusive acronyms or abbreviated garble. Besides, we’re talking about communication between people, and to err is human.

To summarize – in only 64 characters: Your message is the main thing; everything else is just details.


Check out these other social media writing resources:
How Twitter makes you a better writer
Translate text messages from plain English to mobile phone lingo



Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation