Good Grammar is Credibility

The website address is amusing, in a childish sort of way, but readers may enjoy for the article itself I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar from the  Harvard Business Review site. “Yes, language is constantly changing,” he writes,

but that doesn’t make grammar unimportant. Good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet. In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have. They are a projection of you in your physical absence. And, for better or worse, people judge you if you can’t tell the difference between their, there, and they’re.

And they judge you for very good, practical, reasons:

I’ve found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts . . . . Applicants who don’t think writing is important are likely to think lots of other (important) things also aren’t important.

As I’ve told writers who insist that “the idea” is all that matters and since (they believe, usually wrongly) that the readers will get “the idea,” they can write badly and I shouldn’t press them to write well: grammar may be a little thing in comparison with ideas, but he who is faithless in little will be faithless in much.
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