To Spell-Check or Not Spell-Check Your Blogs – Or Keeping My Blogging Obsession In Check
Lately, I’ve noticed that I’m spending longer than usual on editing my blog posts, for fear that I’ll post something that’s poorly written (which may happen anyways). I’m a bit obsessed and very opinionated about not having spelling and typos in published writing. There are many popular blogs that have great content but reek of typos and poor grammar. While a few typos are fine, what about those blogs that have great conceptual content and yet are completely incoherent? I’m not going to get caught up in debate about this being a racial comment, because it’s not. If you choose to blog in a certain language, any language, shouldn’t you at least attempt to be coherent in that language?
Am I talking about capturing every single spelling mistake and typo? No. Am I talking about having perfect grammar? No. I’ve talked about bad writing before, and will probably talk about it again. As I’ve said, I’m pretty opinionated about this topic. While I was a magazine editor and publisher, I also did a great deal of copy-editing. (The irony being that when I was co-writing a book on Web Development, I didn’t bother editing past 2 drafts – primarily because of time limitations. As well, there’s only so many times you can edit 900 pages of raw content before you go insane.)
Therein lies my obsession: my editing background. But I don’t care about a few typos, or whether to use ‘colour’ or ‘color’. I don’t care about starting sentences with ‘But’ or ‘And’, or using “2” instead of “two”. I don’t care about occasionally violating some rule about “dangling participles” or what have you. My grammar is far from perfect. I’m just talking about taking a bit of care to make sure your postings are actually legible. As I’ve said in a previous post, we humans rarely use correct grammar in everyday speech. And since many of us bloggers rely on a very personal voice in our writing, I don’t feel blog grammar has to 100% perfect. If you disagree with that, I applaud you. In fact, it doesn’t hurt to try to attain such a goal, provided it doesn’t make our posts stiff and formal – something many “business” blogs suffer.
But herein lies my own dilemma: After all I’ve said above and in previous posts, I stand in danger of being a hypocrite. As a freelance writer and Internet consultant, I keep strange hours. For the last four nights, I’ve been up until at least 3 am blogging. And with the number of new blogs I’ve started (and unfortunately been unable to maintain consistenly), I am doing something either blog-related or consulting related at least 10-18 hrs every day. If I were to thoroughly edit every post I’m now writing, there would probably have to be at least 36 hrs in a day, if not more. My conclusion so far is that maybe I’m just a little too obsessed about editing every word of all of my posts, and pray that maybe my readers are more forgiving than I am/ have been.
(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.blogspot.com
Am I talking about capturing every single spelling mistake and typo? No. Am I talking about having perfect grammar? No. I’ve talked about bad writing before, and will probably talk about it again. As I’ve said, I’m pretty opinionated about this topic. While I was a magazine editor and publisher, I also did a great deal of copy-editing. (The irony being that when I was co-writing a book on Web Development, I didn’t bother editing past 2 drafts – primarily because of time limitations. As well, there’s only so many times you can edit 900 pages of raw content before you go insane.)
Therein lies my obsession: my editing background. But I don’t care about a few typos, or whether to use ‘colour’ or ‘color’. I don’t care about starting sentences with ‘But’ or ‘And’, or using “2” instead of “two”. I don’t care about occasionally violating some rule about “dangling participles” or what have you. My grammar is far from perfect. I’m just talking about taking a bit of care to make sure your postings are actually legible. As I’ve said in a previous post, we humans rarely use correct grammar in everyday speech. And since many of us bloggers rely on a very personal voice in our writing, I don’t feel blog grammar has to 100% perfect. If you disagree with that, I applaud you. In fact, it doesn’t hurt to try to attain such a goal, provided it doesn’t make our posts stiff and formal – something many “business” blogs suffer.
But herein lies my own dilemma: After all I’ve said above and in previous posts, I stand in danger of being a hypocrite. As a freelance writer and Internet consultant, I keep strange hours. For the last four nights, I’ve been up until at least 3 am blogging. And with the number of new blogs I’ve started (and unfortunately been unable to maintain consistenly), I am doing something either blog-related or consulting related at least 10-18 hrs every day. If I were to thoroughly edit every post I’m now writing, there would probably have to be at least 36 hrs in a day, if not more. My conclusion so far is that maybe I’m just a little too obsessed about editing every word of all of my posts, and pray that maybe my readers are more forgiving than I am/ have been.
(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.blogspot.com
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