There are very, very few writers – even the extremely educated ones – who don’t make mistakes from time to time. You (cmk) seem to want to divide writers into two categories: those who make mistakes, and those who don’t.

In reality, the two categories are: those who make mistakes (and probably know it) and those who make mistakes (and think they don’t make any).

Great post, Pat! You are absolutely right that SEO, SEM, usability, and any other internet buzzword begins and ends with human beings and how (and whether or not) they understand, enjoy, and talk about what we do. Thanks for the reminder.

Also, I wanted to make the point that I don’t discredit a blogger based on one spelling error. I start to lose faith in bloggers that repeatedly make the same mistakes. Another issue I have with spelling errors is that no one seems to fix them. A post that comes through on my Google Reader with errors almost never gets corrected on the live site. A perfect example of this is a fairly recent Search Engine Journal article where they misuse “steak” for “stake” several times throughout the article, even though they used it correctly in the headline – http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yahoo-myspace-merging-news-corp-wants-yahoo-25-stake/5148/

Now Pat, based on your “social network” model of the internet, do you think I will get lots of “networking”, “recommendations”, and rank high in the “list of websites ranked by networks and recommendations?”

PS. This post inspired me to, from hence forth, create content based on the social network model of the internet. I can’t wait to roll this out.

Thank you,
Evan

Cmk: I agree that lack of attention to detail (spelling mistakes) is correlated with research prior to writing articles. But it isn’t causal. Discarding an established person’s credibility based solely upon spelling, complaining about it etc, is pretty close minded.

Regarding your critique of “it’s” and “too,to”, when was the last time you were confused by their improper usage? Thankfully context almost always clears it up. If you had said non-natives english speakers might be confused by his sloppy use of homonyms, I fully agree. But otherwise, its quite pedantic and ivory tower like to get so worked up over it.

I trt to follow truth wherever it leads…even if it leads to a poorly spelt blog that constantly talks about farts and poop. LOL! He helps me be less stuck up.

As for Pat – you see writing and communication as two separate things. I see writing mistakes as a barrier to communication.

Myself may think that *you’re* violating concordance.

> to catch these simple mistakes, perhaps you aren’t fully researching what you’re writing or
> checking your sources.

I think that perhaps you aren’t fully researching what you’re . . . checking your sources, either. Eh? For starters, you might try Strunk and White’s, where you would see that this construction is ambiguous and stylistically poor.

Myself really thinks that some people aren’t getting laid. Maybe instead of reading S&W tonight, cmk, you should chat up some babe. This is not meant as a dig, but simply to highlight an inherent opportunity cost; the more time one spends on the form of one’s message, the less one can spend on the content. And I think Pat’s (brilliant) point here is, “what do people really value? Form, or function?”

P.S. Yes, it’s Saturday night. I see the irony. My weak excuse is that my girlfriend out of town.