In short blocks of text, like Google or Facebook ads (or, in the offline world, billboards and tag lines), every word counts. That’s why I’m shocked by how often these ads are full of spelling or grammatical errors, or are so mangled as to be beyond comprehension. Here are a few recent examples:
1. A Google [...]

Twitter’s format lends itself to strange abbreviations, missing punctuation, and so on. But if you’re trying to build a business brand — or if you’re a reputable news organization — it’s worth taking a few extra seconds to proofread your tweet and make sure it makes sense and contains no errors (other than those you’ve [...]

A surprising number of writing and editing mistakes combined to result in the New York Times publishing an article about Walter Cronkite that contained a whopping seven errors, including incorrect names and dates, among other problems.
When I was in journalism school, we were automatically docked 50% on any assignment that had a name spelled wrong [...]

I saw this Google Ad in Gmail today:

Business Writing Courses – ContinuingStudies.UBC.ca – Abstracts, Proposals, Reports & Corresondence. Enrol now!

I’m not sure I’d want to take Business Writing courses from a  place that can’t spell “correspondence”…

What I mean, of course,  is not that I’m confused by President Obama’s speeches, but that he has a tendency to choose the wrong pronoun when referring to himself. Like many people, he seems to have had the “Suzy, Sally, Billy, and I” pattern drilled into his head as a child to the extent that [...]