Everyone's a writer - or thinks they are

One of the challenges facing a professional writer is that so many people think they're writers. They'll pay a fortune to have a website designed and will then fill it with content that has spelling and grammatical mistakes, poorly constructed sentences, and no concept of SEO. What a waste of money. If only they'd realise that the finished product - and the written content is just as important as the visuals - can turn potential customers away. Sure, not everyone is a stickler for correctly placed apostrophes, but some people do care about that sort of thing and won't give their custom to a business that appears to be unprofessional at first glance.

Maybe the problem stems from the fact that we all write in some way. We wrote essays at school and we've written letters to Grandma thanking her for the birthday money, so therefore everyone thinks he or she is a writer. An engineer doesn't face the problem that everyone thinks they're capable of doing their own engineering if they want to build a bridge, a doctor doesn't face the problem that everyone thinks they can treat themselves for cancer, but trying to convince people that they need a professional writer can be much less straightforward.

The world has more and more written text these days, with thousands of web pages going out every day full of written content - much of it poorly written, mistake-laden rubbish. Sometimes it doesn't matter if it's just between friends but businesses can't afford to be slack when it comes to overall presentation.  

ends 7th Sept 2011