If your brain works like mine then I ‘m also sure you must have read an article which had several misspelled words or poor grammar and you had to stop to re-read it because it didn’t make sense the first time.
When I read those types of articles, one thing that comes to my mind is that the author must not be all that knowledgeable or all that professional if he/she can’t spell correctly or use correct sentence structure.
I even read an article in which the author was writing about how to write good articles. In his article he mentioned the importance of proofreading your articles to make sure the spelling and grammar are first rate. Well, he had several spelling mistakes as well as grammatical errors. You can just imagine how much faith I put into what he said in his article.
Yes, our brains do not use words to form ideas and thought. The brain uses images and pictures. So why should it matter if we have spelling mistakes and use poor grammar?
Have you ever wondered how people can read 1,200 words per minute or even 327,486 words per minute when normal conversations poke along at 125-250 words per minute and the average person reads at 276 words per minute?
It’s because our brain takes the words and forms images. A full page of words could be translated into one simple image. Also the faster we read the better our comprehension becomes because our brains can form a better image when all of the words are taken in rapidly and the better images helps provide better recall.
You are absolutely correct to be asking this question right about now: “If my brain translates words into pictures and the faster I read the better those images are and if I can read a garbled paragraph (one where the lettering in each word is rearranged), then why do I need to worry about my spelling and grammar?”
Hmmm. You make a very good point. For some people, me for example, when they read an article and come across a misspelled word or incorrect usage of a word, it’s like hitting a brick wall head on. The author’s credibility begins to be questioned. The action or the message the author wanted to get across looses its power.
Just like the article I mentioned above about how to write great articles, if I had any errors in this article, how much faith would you put into the message that is being presented?
It has been said that English is one of the hardest languages to learn. I thought it would be Chinese. English is hard to learn because one word could have several different meanings or the sound of one word could be spelt several different ways and mean different things as well. Just think of “to”, “too” and “two” or “left behind” and “turn left”. This is why writing in English needs to be more precise and correct than many other languages that are not as confusing.
It always helps to have someone else proofread your writing because you as the author may not see errors that “fresh” eyes will catch.
Bottom line, if you want to stand out as an expert in your field and to be taken as a person others would gladly follow, then you must take an extra few minutes to make sure what you write is free of spelling and grammatical errors.
(After writing this the first thing that crossed my mind is that I had better go back and re-read my past articles to make sure I don’t have any mistakes in them.)