For a long time I wondered what it was about misspellings that turned people off so bad. That was until I met a grammar professor in the Community College of Philadelphia. She was someone who mentored me when I needed mentoring. She taught me everything I know (and I wish I could have learned my stuff better). But her reaction to a piece that had misspellings was astonishing. She treated it as if it was a piece of manure (for the lack of better term). Till then, I didn’t know there were people who reacted to misspellings and grammatical errors like she did. But she is a super smart person, and I doubt she is the only one who’s got problem with people who don’t edit their piece.

I personally don’t have a big problem with pieces that have typos in them. Don’t get me wrong. If you have 5 typos in every paragraph, then you’ve got some real issues. But typos happen. They happen in books. And books are edited by professional editors. My rule of thumb is, you shouldn’t worry too much about misspellings as long as you dedicate enough time to edit your pieces. I put my best effort forward. I type fast and read faster, but slow down a bit when editing my blog posts. It really comes down to how much time, money, and resources you can dedicate to editing your posts. If you have a dedicated person for this purpose, great. But if you are just a one-man blogger, then you should spend more time on providing value to your readers than searching for the smallest typos in your piece.

Not everyone agrees on this issue. A lot of folks believe you should bleed your eyes out until you have a perfect piece to put on your blog. I believe perfection is a fool’s gold. You show me a perfect blog post, and I’ll show you 5 things that are wrong with it.

What’s your take: how much time do you spend fixing those typos? Do you outsource the process? Comment away!