Brian Clark's copyblogger blog is always packed full of useful information. And one of his best ever posts was his Five Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Dumb. He lists them as:

1. Your vs. You're
2. It's vs. Its
3. There vs. Their
4. Affect vs. Effect
5. The Dangling Participle

It's a great list, and one that I used to send to journalists learning how to blog. I'd also like to add one other hugely commonplace mistake that many bloggers make:

     6 . Lose vs. Loose

It was only last week that I was reading a blog whose author I greatly admire, and who often provides really great information on their blog, but who had used the word loose when what they meant was lose. Now, this blogger uses their blog to promote their consulting services. But if I were a potential client thinking of hiring a consultant, that little grammatical error would mean that the blogger would not be getting my business.

The great thing about blogs is that they allow us to write on a subject as soon as we want to, with all the benefits of immediacy and relevance that brings. But it shouldn't be an excuse to write without thinking about grammar, spelling & structure. These are not (and should not be thought of as) burdens. They are tools to make sure that the widest possible audience can understand what we are saying.

They are also a sign that care & attention have been taken when writing the blog, the same sort of care & attention that a client is going to want taken over their work. A good metaphor here (another one of Brian's favourite tools) is the one I have used in the headline of this post.

Top chef Antony Bourdain once said that the first thing you should do upon entering a restaurant is to check out the toilets. If they are dirty, then God knows what the kitchen will be like. If a restaurant cannot be bothered to take care over the customer-facing areas of a business, it makes one think about those parts which are hidden away. Equally, bloggers should think about what the grammar on their blog says about them, if they don't want to loose [sic] any more potential customers.

I'm the SEO Director of new full service digital agency Altogether, which incorporates eyefall which I joined in April. Before that I used to work in online publishing, helping journalists understand the differences between writing online & for print.