Grammar & Legitimacy
Recently I went out of town on a long business trip across the country. The company I work for very kindly paid my way, and for ease of billing and whatnot they had particular vendors lined up that I should contract with for my hotel room, flight, and the car service to pick me up from the airport. I prepared my car reservations and, like a good little netizen, clicked to read the “Terms of Use” before clicking to submit. Oh boy. Typos and misspelled words EVERYWHERE. Now, this was a small local service we were working with, and the two drivers who helped me out during my trip were wonderful, their service left me with absolutely no complaints. But I admit, I felt a moment of worry looking at that terms of use pop-up. “Seriously?” I thought. “Are these guys legit? I mean, I’m going alone to the other side of the country, I’m arriving fairly late… are these really the people I want picking me up at the airport of a big city?”
Like I said, they were great. But it made me wonder for a bit. Maybe you think that’s unfair, but… think about it. When you go to a restaurant, you want to see that the tables and plates are clean. You want the floors to be well-swept. You don’t want to see bugs or other pests. But that’s for sanitary reasons, right? Fair enough. What about if you need to hire a lawyer or an accountant. You might be justified in feeling a little nervous if the lawyer’s office is a wreck and his secretary is too busy texting to greet you. That’s unprofessional. The lawyer might still be fantastic and provide exactly the assistance at you need, and at a reasonable rate. But you’re probably going to wonder, at first, whether you’re in the right place.
Back at work, I had a meeting today where several people went through some PowerPoint presentations. One of them had misused apostrophes on one of her slides. I know, I know — so minor, right? It was a greengrocer’s apostrophe — like “Banana’s 4 for a dollar,” for example. Lots of people mess that up, and maybe she made the PowerPoint in a hurry. Maybe she just didn’t notice. Maybe she didn’t care. This is a pretty high-class company this person works for, but the PowerPoint deck was internal-only. Maybe she’s justified in not caring if she had a typo. But I probably wasn’t the only one in the audience who cringed a little (though I probably was the only one who contemplated slipping her my business card when her presentation was over). I would never, of course — I would never want to embarrass someone like that. But what if she’d been planning to show that slide to clients? Ouch.
Sometimes those of us who want to correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling are treated as pedants, too focused on minutiae for our own good. And sometimes that’s a legitimate complaint – grammatical correctness has it’s time and place, and it can certainly be taken to unnecessary (and/or rude) extremes. But every time I see a grammatical error in business publications, my first thought is for the public image of that company. Because I’m not the only one who sees those errors and recognizes them, and that kind of error can make a person seriously doubt the legitimacy and accuracy of the rest of the information being presented in the document. If someone didn’t take the time to run spell-check or correct basic punctuation, what else did they not take the time to double-check or research?
