Do you take grammar seriously while writing? Or do you consider the content more important than the grammar itself? If that’s the case, then you might want to think again, because you might loose your job or might not even get one due to poor grammar. Good grammar is very important not only in online writing, but also in the corporate world. Many job recruiters test a candidate’s writing skills before deciding to hire him. Writing skills don’t necessarily mean heavy vocabulary, or great expressions. Very few jobs have such things as a requirement. But good grammar is something that is considered by many. Here are some reasons why you might loose your job due to poor English grammar.
1. Words are your best offense
Grammar is extremely important, because
the audience that is reading your work has nothing to judge you by
except for your words. No facial expressions, no body language, no
gestures, nothing of the sort. Your words are the only weapons you have.
And if you don’t equip them wisely with proper grammar, then there are
others’ works people would rather read.
2. Unprofessionalism
Grammatical mistakes makes corporations
and companies look unprofessional. It reflects on the quality of their
service. How many times have you come across a user manual that has poor
grammar? It’s true that most of them are translated from other
languages such as Japanese and German, and hence have problems with
translations. But if you have two almost identical products, with the
same price, features and quality, which one would you rather buy? The
one whose user manual has translation problems, or the one that is
properly translated / written?
3. Grammatical errors aren’t good for character
Let’s just be blunt about it. Grammatical
errors make you look stupid. Now criticize me all you like, but it’s a
fact, and I am sure most of you know this deep down, even if you don’t
admit it. When you see a webpage that has poorly written content, won’t
you leave that page immediately? Or to put it more precisely, would you
subscribe to a daily newspaper that contains lots of grammatical errors?
If you make many grammatical errors, people are bound to judge you. And
no matter how well you know about a subject, grammatical errors will
kill the impression.
4. It reflects on your work
The reason why job recruiters look for
fluency in grammar, and not in other aspects of language is because it
reflects on the quality of your work, and how good a learner you are.
People who don’t pay attention to grammar have a low attention to
detail, and tend to not concentrate on quality. And if they didn’t learn
how to use proper grammar for the past 20 years or so, they won’t be
learning much about quality management any time soon.
5. Poor grammar is difficult to understand
When there are many grammatical errors in
your writing, it is difficult for people to understand exactly what you
mean. Punctuation can make or break the meaning of a sentence. And
wrongly placed punctuation, and other grammatical errors can lead your
readers to interpret your meaning in a very different way than you
originally intended. It’s and its are two different words with different meanings. Similarly, they’re, their, and there are three totally different words. using the wrong word in the wrong place can totally change the meaning of a sentence.
Hence, grammatical mistakes don’t build
much respect for you. Quite the contrary. For many job recruiters,
especially for jobs that requires some bit of writing, a grammar test is
like a litmus test, which can tell them whether a person is right for
the job or not.
