One of my pet peeves is seeing incorrect spelling on a website where a professional image is most critical. What really scares me is that fewer and fewer people care enough 
to put the time and expense into making sure their web pages are error free. Errors such as misspellings, typos, grammatical errors, and general bad phrasing of sentences and paragraphs. I think with all the texting on cell phones, iPads, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, it is common to abbreviate and use popular text speech. This is understandable when you are working with small devices and when making a quick casual comment.
However, for something as important as a website, especially a commercial or professional website, spelling and grammar are more important than some might think. It’s the first thing I notice when I am browsing web pages. Maybe it’s because of what I do for a living, but I’ve definitely seen a decrease in literacy over the years. It surprises me to see a large brand name company with errors in their ads, brochures, TV commercials, and web pages, and I see these more and more every day.
Unfortunately, a spell checker isn’t going to help with grammatical errors, and grammar checkers are not always accurate. For example, the misuse of apostrophes and words such as their, there, and they’re. Other common errors include words such as accept, except; advice, advise; 
affect, effect; complement, compliment; it’s, its; loose, lose; miner, minor; past, passed; principal, principle; stationary, stationery; than, then; threw, through; your and you’re. There are more common mistakes people make, such as seperate instead of separate. Remember, there’s A RAT in the middle of separate. Also, it’s “a lot”, not “alot”. There are to, two, too many to list. These drive me nuts!
There are some that I have trouble with, too, like accommodation and recommendation. Not so easy to remember if there is one c or two; one m or two. Do you remember the famous rule that we were all taught in elementary school, “i” before “e” except after “c”, as in the word “receive”? However, this does not hold true for other words like science or conscience. It’s certainly not a sin to not know the spelling of every word in the English language. However, there is this thing (as archaic as it may sound) called a 
DICTIONARY! There is a great site online that I have bookmarked and pull up regularly when I need a dictionary or thesaurus. The URL is http://www.merriam-webster.com/. How cool is that? You don’t even have to wipe the dust off of your books, it’s right there! The Merriam-Webster Dictionary! Continue reading »