Almost every company supports a blog these days as do literally millions of unaffiliated individuals. Blogs are a relatively informal medium by nature, so lots of bloggers take considerable liberties in terms of tone, diction, etc. Many choose to employ a conversational style even in a corporate setting. Breaking the rules a bit breathes life into otherwise stale content, yet writers need to respect basic limits in order to maintain the aura of professionalism. This establishes credibility and builds trust, which is especially important in cyberspace.

It’s fair to assume that most paid bloggers successfully passed college level English courses, which means the grammatical errors should be kept to a minimum. Nevertheless, there are several recurring mistakes throughout the blogosphere. Here are the most common mishaps along with a few tips on avoiding them. read more

Are you a stickler for spelling, grammar and syntax? Have you ever turned away from a blog or website because you found a factual error?

gooseGrade Survey: People Care About Typos and Factual Mistakes on Blogs and Social Media

Do your blog readers care whether you can spell Barack Obama?

A 2008 survey conducted by gooseGrade, a crowdsourcing editing tool for bloggers and social media content creators, tried to find out how much consumers of new media content really care about typos and factual mistakes. (See TechCrunch’s database entry on gooseGrade.)

The survey had 175 respondents and resulted in data such as the following: read more