How sloppy English is costing internet companies dear

ONE friend admits that “past” and “passed” are two of his spelling blind spots, and no matter how often the difference is explained, he’ll still groan from behind his computer “which one do I need?” and dive for the dictionary.

The difference between him and a recidivist bad speller is that he knows his weak spot, and whenever required to use either word the alarm bells begin a racket inside his head.

He is not alone. Among the most looked-up words in the Oxford English Dictionary are those that sound the same but have different meanings, such as “reign” and “rein” or “pouring” and “poring”. However, while it’s great to hear that people are using dictionaries at all, there clearly isn’t enough of it going on. Internet entrepreneur Charles Duncombe says that a single spelling mistake can cut online sales by as much as 50 per cent.

Mr Duncombe says he’s shocked by the poor quality of written English he’s confronted by when recruiting, and a major problem for online companies is the bugbear of staff who can’t spell. The Confederation of British Industry has long echoed such anxieties, saying too many employers have to provide remedial literacy classes.

According to recent figures from the Office of National Statistics, internet sales in the UK generate £527m a week. With more and more businesses developing online operations, firms are dependent on the old-fashioned written word despite the modern format, and staff’s shortcomings are exposed. Mr Duncombe, whose businesses embrace travel, clothing and mobile phones, measured revenue per visitor on one of his website, and found that revenue was twice as high after a spelling error had been corrected. “If you project this across the whole of internet sales, then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week,” he says. Job applications from both school leavers and graduates often contained either spelling mistakes or poor grammar, with some even using text speak in covering letters. You’d hope that any errors in grammar and punctuation on a home page or product/service description would be picked up and corrected by a beady-eyed proof reader at management level, but with monotonous frequency a glaring mistake is there for potential customers to behold. They’re too busy moving on within seconds to some rival website to find out more.

Basic mistakes in English make you doubt the credibility, competence and even the identity of a business.

It stands to reason. Just as some of us might walk on to another shop to buy pads and pens rather than put our money over the counter of a place that says it sells “stationary”, the same rules apply online.

Education Secretary Michael Gove says tough spelling tests will be set for 11-year-olds, and more time spent reading widely is surely part of the solution. Part of the malaise also appears to be over-dependence on computer spell-checkers, which don’t offer definitions.

How many people these days actually drag that dictionary off the shelf and find out that they have been “poring over their newspaper” rather than “pouring” over it?

There’s also been an insidious societal move towards the dismissal of old-hat correct use of English, with increasing emphasis on free expression and practical effectiveness. In other words, so long as we understand the gist of what someone wants to say does it matter if they didn’t say it properly?

This was summed up by a former university French lecturer I bumped into, who said that one of the reasons he had taken early retirement was “an abhorrent fashion” for not being allowed to penalise students who translated French into English littered with errors of spelling, but had more or less captured the meaning. He felt he was being asked to nod through “acts of linguistic vandalism” and would no longer do it.

As Lynne Truss, the famous pedant (a good thing to be) and popular author of books on grammar, said some years ago: “Is conveying the gist the highest aim of language? Correct me if I’m wrong, but cavemen pointing and grunting got the bloody gist!” With technology meaning that more people are writing more “stuff” than ever before, we’re in danger of getting lost in a miasma of self-expression – a lot of which is badly done.

When you consider education and clear expression as tools of democracy and social mobility, doesn’t it also stand to reason that the more people use language badly the more they simply stay where they are?

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