It always amazes me at what kinds of stuff people allow to be published under their name, especially when they’re doing it with the expectation of making money. More specifically, it amazes me at how poor some of the work is that they publish with the aim of furthering their business endeavors. I have always been of the opinion that if you’re trying to market yourself, you should always put your best foot forward. The idea is that when you are selling yourself, you should be on your “A” game, because that’s the best that you’re ever going to be, when you’re trying to woo potential new clients. And if you can’t be bothered to do that when you’re trying to sell your services, what else are you slacking off on?
It’s like what they say about errors on a job application. The conventional wisdom there is that if there is any kind of error, no matter how minor, on your cover letter or resume, be it typographical, spelling, or grammatical, your resume is going in the trash. Let’s take a line out of my own resume from my description of my time as a bus operator:
Safely operated 40’ and 60’ buses on predefined routes, providing scheduled service to the general public.
Looks decent enough. Good spelling, good grammar, and no typographical errors. I’d hire me. Now here’s the same line, but this time, I have deliberately added a typographical error:
Safely operated 40’ and 60’ buses on predefined routes, providing schedueld service to the general public.
Did you see it? “Scheduled” is now “schedueld”. It doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence (unlike, for example, when “public” inadvertently gets shortened to “pubic”), but if I submitted that to someone in hopes of getting hired, I would have no business being upset when I don’t get any calls back, because I didn’t do my due diligence in making sure that I had put my own best foot forward. I couldn’t be bothered to make sure that I got the words all written correctly, and so there is no reason to think that I wouldn’t miss something far more sensitive on the job that could cost the company a lot of money. The company can easily dodge that potential bullet by not hiring the guy who has already provided documented proof of a lack of attention to detail.
The same thing applied towards companies in times when I’ve been on the hunt for a new job. If I saw typos, misspellings, or grammatical errors in a job listing, I passed them over on sight. If they couldn’t be bothered to proofread their copy before putting it out in hopes of getting a new employee, what else are they not paying attention to, and why would I want to work for a company that is so inattentive? I remember when I saw a job posting on Idealist that listed the compensation as “Commiserate with experience.” My first thought upon seeing “commiserate” instead of “commensurate” was, “Oh, the pay is that bad?” I don’t remember what company that was, but a quick Google search on the term indicates that this mistake happens with some regularity. Either way, they never saw an application with my name on it, as I just laughed at them and moved on. After all, I know me, and I would go crazy dealing with a management that didn’t care about mistakes. I like to think that I’m smarter than to knowingly walk into a disaster like that.
What prompted the discussion in this case was someone who I used to follow on Facebook who made a post on his personal account about a photography service that he provides that he was marketing towards the real estate industry. This was the original post, showing a flyer that he created about his company:
As I looked this over, I couldn’t help but think, you can’t be serious, as I found myself counting the number of simple errors. Here’s the first paragraph, reproduced verbatim, with all errors included:
Dear Valued Real Estate Professional, My name is John Colter SR. Owner of Metafactorum Photography Solution’s. I’m currently expanding my Real Estate Photography Clients to serve more Brands. Here at Metafactorum we take pride in our Brand and the clients we associate our brand with. We pride ourselves on delivering top-quality real estate content at a all inclusive rate, ensuring that you receive exceptional value without compromising on quality. We are extremely flexible with a team of 4 Professional Photographers and 2 Certified Drone pilots. Our comprehensive services are combined to meet the unique needs of real estate professionals like yourself. We understand the importance of presenting your image in the best possible manner to attract potential buyers With our expertise and attention to detail, we aim to exceed your expectations with every project.
Anyone else find that paragraph to be just dripping with irony? For as much as Colter speaks about not compromising on quality, presenting one’s image in the best possible manner, as well as attention to detail, he did none of that here. First, he used capitalization as a way to emphasize certain words, much like the way that some people incorrectly use quotation marks to add emphasis. The odd capitalization doesn’t emphasize much of anything. It just makes it look like that sentence is having a seizure with all of those random pops of capital letters. Along with the very weird capitalization, there are also instances of improper apostrophe usage, representation of numbers as numerals where they should be spelled out, missing punctuation, as well as a big run-on sentence caused by missing punctuation. The rest of the page is no better, with more weird capitalization, more unnecessary apostrophes, typographical errors, improper word usage, and inconsistent spacing between elements. At the end of the day, it looked unprofessional, and it spoke volumes about how much pride he actually takes in his brand, if that’s the kind of presentation that he thinks best represents his brand.
I tried to save him from himself by responding to the post, hoping that this hadn’t actually gone out to any potential clients yet:
I did my best to be helpful. People do judge based on things like that, and it does impact a person’s reputation, and I wanted to see him succeed. If I could save him from himself by getting him to fix his copy before he sent it out to potential clients, then that was a good thing. Turns out, however, that I had wasted my time by engaging with him:
Basically, he told me to take a long walk off of a short pier, and that my behavior was out of bounds because of my race (Colter is black). Okay, then. As far as I’m concerned, if you post something on social media, get ready for comments, and comments of all kinds, both complimentary and critical. It’s like what president Harry S. Truman was known to say: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Colter essentially doubled down on his poor writing, and took greater issue with my calling him out for it than about the point that I was making. He thought that I was embarrassing him, but I wonder if I actually hit a nerve there, i.e. that he recognizes that I was right about the poor copy, and this was his escape mechanism, allowing him to not take responsibility for his own mistakes by claiming that the critic was wrong for pointing out the mistakes in the first place. In other words, this was his way of making himself feel better by claiming persecution, absolving him of any responsibility for doing sloppy work, even though his copy has more holes in it than swiss cheese.
Of course, let’s be real: I stopped caring about what he thought once he brought race into the discussion. Generally speaking, in a situation where the race and/or color of the participants is irrelevant, once you play the race card like that, the discussion is over, and you have automatically lost the argument. Yeah, I’m white, but what does that matter as far as this discussion is concerned? I didn’t choose to be white, just like he didn’t choose to be black. And white people are just as capable of producing sloppy work as black people are. Trust me, I know, having produced a lot of poor work in younger years. So for purposes of the conversation, it doesn’t matter. All it does is make him look like a racist, which, if the poor copy isn’t bad enough, just adds one more reason not to do business with him because I don’t do business with racists. In other words, don’t act like that, because it’s a bigger reflection on you than anyone else.
But regardless of any racial perceptions, bad writing really will sink you faster than anything else, and prevent you from getting a foot in the door even if you are otherwise highly qualified. Note that I haven’t said a word about the quality of the actual work that Colter’s company produces. That’s because as far as I’m concerned, it’s no longer relevant. Because Colter couldn’t be bothered to produce a clean flyer with no obvious and glaring grammatical errors, any contemplation about the prospect of using his services starts and ends right there because of the assumption that the poor copy is just the tip of the iceberg about what else he lets slide.
As another example of how poor writing can ultimately sink you, I remember when I was working at Food & Water Watch, and they hired their first dedicated IT person. While the guy knew his stuff from a technical standpoint, i.e. he was very adept with servers and computer code, he could not write to save his life. It certainly says a lot about the standards that Franklin Pierce College has that they allowed him to graduate with writing skills as atrocious as his were. You don’t know how much systems documentation I had to read that was absolutely riddled with spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors. It bothered me so much that I asked my boss if I could copyedit all of the documentation before it went out to the rest of the organization in an attempt to help keep everyone in the organization looking good, but my offer was turned down. I suspect that they eventually recognized that they had made a mistake in hiring someone who couldn’t write, and that it was their own fault that it happened, because they didn’t ask for a writing sample during the initial application process when that position was hired. I was the one who was responsible for posting the job advertisements, including copyediting all of the posts before they went out (and believe me, the stuff that they sent me was pretty bad), and at the time, I questioned the lack of a writing sample requirement. I was told that we didn’t need to ask for a writing sample because it was IT work, and they wouldn’t need to write. Oh, you sweet summer child, not recognizing that a lot of what goes into IT work is documentation, i.e. they don’t just sling code around all day and work on servers. Though it was somewhat telling that they started requiring a writing sample as a matter of course for all future IT positions. And it’s funny how, based on what I heard from various folks around the organization, no one else took that particular IT guy seriously, either, largely because he couldn’t write worth a crap. Basically, the IT guy might have had a point somewhere, but it was lost amongst a sea of spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors. He eventually left the organization because he felt that he had lost the influence that he once had… and I can’t say that I’m particularly surprised by that. In other words, it was a slow burn, but poor writing skills ultimately sank the guy in the end.
I suppose that all of this is just to say, proofread everything before you publish it. Nothing makes you look like an idiot more quickly than bad writing.