Does Spelling Good Kount?
Well, Yes (But…)

“A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.” – James Joyce

“Ooh la la,” as the Faces sang on album that ended
their career. Last week, the more astute of you
will remember, I made a mistake.

Not just once, but several times over.

I gave a “though” when I meant to “thou.”

Yes, dear reader, to answer the oft-submitted
follow-up question… I do know the difference.

But apparently, the “Auto-Correct” does not… or
no longer does, thanks to my own tinkering no
doubt.

But the bottom line is that, I let the error fly.
And you let me know about it.

Er… thank you for that. As penance, allow me to
give you this, in lieu of today’s regular issue.

In the clips below, you’ll find a whole bunch of
musings on what spelling and grammar should mean –
or shouldn’t — for writers.

We’ll start here…

* Yep, “thou”… “though”… not even close, in all
but a lunatic’s dictionary.

In my own defense and to answer another of your
questions (not asked but implied), there is indeed
a career difference between copyWRITING and
copyEDITING. I’m the former but, it turns out, not
much of the latter.

To make it clear once and for all, copyWRITERs
write stuff. CopyEDITORs disdain what’s written,
usually with red ink on their fingers.

* You won’t believe this, but I’ll try anyway: I
used to be a spelling bee champ. Or at least, a
frequent finalist.

Of course, this was back in eighth grade when
“spell checker” meant “nun with a red pen and a
stern look.” Much more intimidating than a setting
under the “Tools” menu in Microsoft Word.

These days, though, you’re right. It’s all too easy
to let the machines do the work.

And much as machines can make a good frappuccino,
they fall short on subjective judgment.

In that spirit, let’s polish off this old chestnut
(a poem from the CR archives that I didn’t write):

The Spell Checker Poem

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

Ah, ha ha… phew! (Wipe tears of laughter and joy
from thy (thine?) cheeks here) I never get tired of
that one.

** And as long as we’re reading poetry, how about
the one by this clown? Goes by the name Chaucer or
something — what a hack!

Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;
Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye
That sleepen al the night with open yë –
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages –
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seeken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martyr for to seeke
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.

Of course, Chaucer was writing back in the 1300s,
when there was a severe shortage of grade school
teachers or nit-picky emails from readers .

** Here’s a story that seems like it’s got little
to do with anything: Have you ever heard the secret
history of whipped cream?

Says my wife, on one Sunday a long time ago the
King and Queen of France decided to drop on a
friend for dinner. Along with, they brought a
jillion or so of their palace entourage.

France being a Catholic country, all the shops were
closed. So in a panic, the chef and staff had to
improvise a feast.

When it came to dessert, he didn’t know what to do
to make it “fancy” enough for the king. At the last
minute, he whipped together fresh cream and sugar -
- or what they French now call “chantilly,” after
the chateau town where it was invented.

The royals lapped it up (not literally, I don’t
think) but the chef couldn’t be consoled. He went
upstairs and fell on his own sword (literally this
time).

“Too bad,” said the queen, after hearing the news,
“I thought it was pretty good.”

(Gourmands and historians, I know… it sounds like
“une légende urbaine” to me too. But let it go. The
story works better that way.)

** By way of trying to get to a point that story
doesn’t quite get to, try this:

Some time ago, my father showed me a piece of promo
copy from one a client. “Look at this,” he said,
“the calculation in this subhead is wrong.”

And right he was. It was a blunder, flat out. “It
makes me not want to read further. And I’ll bet
that’s true of other readers, too.”

On this, I remember thinking, I’m sure was right
too. And that would be a shame. After all, I knew
the product — a financial letter — that the promo
offered.

Typos aside, it had a 95% accuracy rate on its
market picks… with a running average of better
than 130% gains.

** This begs the question: Just how important are
typos and other small errors, in the grand scheme?

Convention tells us they matter a lot. And lots of
smart people would agree. But I can’t help but
wonder if they — we — should.

** You may or may not know this, but one of
America’s most famous novelists, F. Scott
Fitzgerald was miserable when it came to spelling.

So many editors refused to look at his work because
of it, he had a room in his hope papered with their
rejection letters.

Even Maxwell Perkins, who finally saw potential
behind the typos, called Fitzgerald’s spelling
skills “lamentable.”

And Fitzgerald never got over his bad spelling
either. He even repeatedly misspelled the name of
one of his closest writer friends, Hemingway, as
“Earnest Hemminway.”

I’m not making that up.

** Hemingway wasn’t much better. He regularly told
his editors that fixing his garbage spelling
mistakes was “what they were paid to do.”

Faulkner, too, was ham-handed at spelling. Even
though he and Hemingway both won Nobel Prizes for
Literature.

So were Flannery O’Connor, poet John Keats, and
Jane Austen — all notoriously bad with the typos
and genuine spelling mistakes.

Along with them were John F. Kennedy, William
Butler Yeats, Winston Churchill and Ben Franklin.

Again, I’m not making this up.

In a love letter, Keats famously wrote “purplue”
instead of “purple.” When his lover caught him on
it, he tried to convince her it was a real word,
meaning “a cross between blue and purple.”

Thanks to her thick Hampshire accent, Austen
thought ‘tomatoes’ was spelled ‘tomatas.’

Franklin, not to be outdone, used to blame his
spelling mistakes on the “inadequate alphabet.”

Even Einstein was a rotten speller — twice over,
it turns out, because he made mistakes in both
English and German.

Does that make any of these men and women “flops?”
Does it make their work irrelevant or discardable?

Fortunately, not in the eyes of some.

** What I’m getting at, I guess, is that — sure –
we all hate to make mistakes.

And yes, the rules of style and grammar DO matter.
Absolutely. But even if you can’t forgive the
writer before you, be sure to tell yourself this
much:

That style is surface, not substance. And substance
is far, far more important to writing well.

** This is important because, ask yourself, how
many times have you read technically perfect
writing that had no heart?

On the flip side, have you ever read a typo-laden
note from, say, a little kid… that still managed
to hit you in the gut?

** Rules matter, but sometimes… they don’t matter
so much as we seem to think they should, is I guess
what we’re getting at. Or trying to. Some years
back, I wrote about this in another issue of the
CR. It went something like this:

“Who needs rhetorical questions?” asks Ned Hardy,
self-anointed curator of the Internet.

He has 22 more zingers like these in his post, “How
to Write Good” (yes, his winking title, not mine).

For instance, #4 which warns, “Employ the
vernacular” and the ever popular #2, “Prepositions
are not words to end sentences with.”

At #3, we can forgive him the overused, “Avoid
cliches like the plague (they’re old hat).”

But only because he’s got my favorites at #10 and
#15, where he says “One should never generalize”
and “Be more or less specific.”

Mind you, I’m not always a fan of these “rules”
lists, mostly because I’m not a fan of writing
rules in general.

How so?

Don’t get me wrong, I believe rules matter. But do
they always apply? No. At least as simply as Ned’s
list tries to pretend. For instance, at rule #18,
he says, “One word sentences? Eliminate.”

That’s hogwash.

In copy and lots of writing, one-word sentences
provide a kind of illumination and rhythm can be a
great way to underscore a point and control pacing.
I use them all the time, and without apology.

Likewise, his list warns at #19, “Analogies in
writing are like feathers on a snake.” Hmm. In my
opinion, that’s as overly strict as… as… well,
you get the point.

** Those aren’t the only times I’ve thrown a few
tips out there that seem to fly in the face of
conventional wisdom.

In fact, digging through the archives, it looks
like I’ve done it a lot more than I remember.

For instance, here’s an old tidbit on how to use
numbers in copywriting:

“Statistics, percentages, dollar amounts… can all
hit harder than words, used properly. But where
normal writing might spell out a number,
copywriters often opt for the actual digit (9…
3… 5,632%) when possible.

“Why? Because it’s much faster to soak up and
harder hitting. It sticks. And it’s instant. Both
are things that all good copy must be.”

Or this one, on how to “write like we talk:”

“The grand-daddy of rules about sales copy is that
we’re supposed to ‘write like people talk…’ This
simply means that you generally want to use shorter
sentences… even clipped phrases and small
words… plus lots of contractions… and, yes, the
occasional (or even frequent) ellipsis.

“Oh, and one line paragraphs.

“Without verbs.

“Not always, but often enough that people move
between sentences in a way that mimics what we call
‘barstool speaking.’

** What I guess I’m saying is this: Yes, typos can
be dangerous (just ask the guy who blew through
that “SOTP” sign).

And yes, even small errors can send one miles off
course down the road (I read that once in a juice
bottlecap). We — me included — should all pay
more attention.

But just be sure that the devotion to precision
isn’t costing you a greater insight, which is
simply this: good writing and good thinking in
general depend much more on the quality of the core
ideas than on the style in which they’re presented.

This nor anything else is an excuse to write or
think sloppy. It’s just a correlated caution.

Or at least, it’s what I think quietly to myself
(up until now) each time I get an email that
starts, “Hey, don’t you know how to spell…?”

Contributed by John Forde
Guest Contributor
http://copywritersroundtable.com/