“The cow jumped over the moon.”

Subject. Verb. Predicate.

For most native English speakers, most of us don’t even blink an eye when writing a note to a friend, writing a blog post or submitting a proposal. However, you would be surprised at the number of run-on sentences, poor spelling and other grammatical errors that I continue to come across on the Internet.

Poor grammar style can (and often is) viewed as more than just a silly mistake. In a business world that is becoming increasingly dependent upon the Internet for conveying ideas, information, products and services, grammar errors such as leaving letters off of words, mistaking “their” for “there” and other faux pas can put a serious dent in your credibility and may wind up costing you valuable business. This is almost certain on webpages where there is a combination of several grammatical errors combined with poor SEO design.

Learning English All Over Again

Most of us who have been using the Internet for some time now can almost immediately tell the difference between someone who is a native speaker of English and is just making silly grammar mistakes versus a non-native English speaker who used some sort of translation software to turn their native language into English.

As a word to the wise, if you are a non-native English speaker and/or if you are a native speaker of English who is perhaps not as strong in the area of writing, it is always advised to have several eyes look over your work. CEOs, higher tier executives and others who are in powerful positions never fail to have someone look over their shoulder before giving a speech, creating a campaign or throwing together a marketing strategy.

Don’t be that guy that everyone secretly points their finger at and whispers about how they can’t type a sentence to save their life. Instead, use your resources, take out a few books and/or enlist the help of a professional for the short term to help you brush up on your English writing skills. Communication on the Internet is vital to the success of so many businesses; and the last thing you want is for your company’s message to get lost due to a few missing apostrophes, commas, periods or misinterpreted homonyms.

In the United States, there doesn’t seem to be many restrictions to building a website besides having a few bucks to pay for a domain name. That’s pretty much it! It seems like anyone can slap up a website in a matter of hours and profess to be some sort of an “expert” on something. But what does your website look like- and more importantly, what is your website saying about you to other people?

I’m not going to name names here, but lately, it’s as if there are an increasing number of crappy websites out there. Websites in which there are typos in every other paragraph, websites where the font choice could have been better or the color scheme a little more soothing on the eyes, etc…It makes you wonder, “What were they thinking?!” as you hastily reach for your mouse to click off the screen.

Quality, Quality, Quality!

I think that there are many of us out there who are so overly obsessed with people coming to our sites that we feel as if we MUST publish or post something every single day of the week.  In the meantime, consider the following: Would you rather visit a website in which there are five “space-filler-type” posts for each day of the work week or a site that produces one well-thought out, researched post per week? Which one would keep you coming back for more? Which one of these will help to build your reputation as well as your credibility?

Quality will almost always win out over quantity. However, because many of us are concerned about the search engine optimization (SEO) aspect, this often gets pushed aside. Instead, we want to make sure that we have at least X amount of words per page and of the X amount of words, X percentage has to be comprised of a certain keyword, etc. Just to play devil’s advocate here for a minute, if you marketed your website and networked, AND you wrote killer content, would you really need to be as focused on your website making the first page of Google OR would people already know where and how to find you? Hmm…

Plagiarism.  The dictionary defines it as the use or close imitation of language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.. [source]  But since the inception of the Internet, and more specifically, the emergence of weblogs, there has been an overly generous amount of wiggle room in how people choose (or don’t choose) to refer to things in their writing.

Knowing Better

It’s one thing to read someone else’s blog or to browse through the Internet and see something that you really find compelling and want to write about.  Heck, you may be thinking to yourself, “They say it so much better than I could even begin to, so I’ll just copy exactly what they have and call it a day.”

Wrong.

It still amazes me to come across a piece of information on one site, think to myself that it seems really familiar, and then realize later that the reason for this familiarity was because it was copied verbatim from another site.  It’s not that difficult to reference something.  Even if you’re unsure about the proper way to reference something on the Internet, referencing where you obtained a certain tidbit of information is MUCH better than not mentioning where you received your sudden knowledge.  It makes you look suspicious- like you’re hiding something.

Dealing with Plagiarism

Unfortunately, there are plenty of unscrupulous people out there waiting to bring you down simply because they’re too lazy to write content themselves.  If this is the case, there are a couple of things you can do:

• Examine the content of what you have written and compare it word-by-word with the content in question.
• Send a non-threatening email, politely asking the blogger or other culprit to kindly remove the article in question from their web site.
• Conduct a “WhoIs” lookup based on the web domain name in order to find the registrar and/or name of the web hosting company so that a formal complaint about copied content can be wagered.

Have any other advice, stories or tips about plagiarism?  We’d love to hear them!

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