Note to Gen Y: Spelling DOES Matter

I was making a sales call with a local retailer last week, when an entrepreneur walked in off the cold streets of Oakville, ON with flyers in hand. He waited patiently until my pitch was done, then handed both myself and my soon-to-be client some business cards and attractive, colored flyers.

I flinched. Both the flyer and the card had a spelling mistake IN HIS COMPANY NAME… ditto in his website domain name.

I felt really bad for this gentle, somewhat home renovator/carpenter out peddling his wares… not so much because he was driven in these harsh economic times to peddle door-to-door, but because his error was spelt:  I-N-E-P-T.

To me, that is…

I am aware that spelling isn’t such a big deal to everyone, and by that, I mean Generation Y (the 20-somethings). I’ve employed many Gen Yers in the past few years for whom spelling is an option - and not even a very popular option at that.

MEMO TO GEN Y: A lot of business customers are my age (45) or older, and for us SPELLING MATTERS! So much so that we will make a knee-jerk negative judgment of a product or service if we see a spelling mistake. Maybe that doesn’t seem fair to you, but it is entirely true.

My generation, and my parents’, were raised by old-school grammarians - some of them even had the hard edge of a ruler come down on their knuckles for improper sentence structure and misspellings.

Yes, I know it’s the day and age of cellphone texting (”ur late 2day”) and Microsoft Spellcheck (which totally doesn’t catch everything and forget it if you’re Canadian or British, MS doesn’t care about that form of spelling).

Spelling matters - to me and others in positions of authority. And if it doesn’t matter to you… IT SHOULD.

(end of rant)