by Jack Conner

Created on: February 08, 2008   Last Updated: March 06, 2010

Poor spelling and grammar on the Internet is sadly inevitable and not simply because of the various spelling differences between American English and, well, English.

A few years back now, when this writer was first getting his feet wet in the words business, he had the chance to speak with BBC broadcaster, former NME journalist and author of two highly acclaimed books (Cider with Roadies and Pies and Prejudice), Stuart Maconie.

Said chat came at an interesting time in your narrator's life; with only a few print clips to his name, this young, would-be wordsmith was about to start his first full-time job at a magazine whilst looking at the world wide web as a viable option to further expand his writing portfolio.

With Stuart's break in the writing world coming long before most people even knew what the Internet was, this writer was interested to know whether the ex-Q Magazine writer believed that the Internet offered a solid platform for other writers to display their talents. His answer went something like this:

"The problem with the Internet is that anybody can set up a website and write whatever they want. There are no real editors [in the sense of a print media editor], and so not only does writing on the Internet have the potential to be rife with inaccuracies, there's also every chance that there'll be nobody checking your work for spelling errors, grammar mistakes and such like."

Several years on and, by and large, this still holds true.

For many years, most of us received the bulk of our information through the medium of print.

Newspapers, magazines and books are products, written by professional writers, behind which sit professional editors and proofreaders. It's their jobs to be experts on spelling, grammar, style and format and to ensure that errors in such areas are virtually non-existent within the written page.

And whilst the occasional glitch will almost always be overlooked, for the most part, we have grown up with information sources that are shining examples of good grammar and superb spelling.

What this means is that most of us have grown up to expect well-written information, something the Internet isn't really in a position to deliver.

Why? Because, as Stuart says, anyone can set up a website, anyone can become a website writer and anyone can become a website copy editor, yet without the skills and training that professionals in the print world have, the Internet simply can't provide the same level of quality, error-free writing.

Things could be different of course; websites could always hire professional editors to ensure their writing is presented to top quality standards.

Yet since most sites just don't have the funds available to print publishers, it's likely that they'll have a hard time tempting most professionals away from the big-money jobs.

This means that, until things change on the financial side, grammar mistakes and spelling errors will continue to crop up all over the web.

Take this article for example. This will be proofed by its author at least twice before being launched into cyberspace, yet without a fresh pair of professional eyes to pick through it with the proverbial fine comb, even this article is likely to bring up an overlooked mistake somewhere along the line.

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