Question for you: Have you noticed that people’s ability to spell words correctly is getting worse?
We have. We’re receiving more emails from pet owners to vets that are full of misspellings, punctuation errors and incomplete sentences, almost on a daily basis.
They often look something like this (we received these today):
“My grandmother has a chow and he is about 12 he is very difficult to have groomed is there something we can give him to keep him came? Also he is now walking with a limp and one of legs are hurting him because he is 60 ponds it difficult for me to get him down the stair because her building is a walk up and she live on the third floor. ”
or
“My sheltie is very ill atg this point. He cannot stand or pick his head up.
He makes little yelps–could he be in pain. This is the first time I have hearfd these sounds. He has spinal stenosis and is approximate 12-13 (Laddie is a wonderful rescue dog). Thank you for yhour help. “
—-
Now you might think, as we did at first, that schooling today is getting worse (perhaps) or that people today use Facebook and text messages so much they’ve forgotten how to write a real sentence.
And these are a big part of the problem, but I realized it is not all of it.
Why? Because I found out I was doing the same thing.
Recently, while I was waiting to pick up a friend, I decided to get some ‘work’ done using my phone. I have a smart phone as I suspect many of you do, and I can check my email and reply and send a text message. Nothing new. I can also go online and visit and order things online, update any web sites, process online orders, do banking, etc. etc. etc. It’s a real time saver and I use my phone constantly for non-phone related, online activity more than I use it as a phone. However it has a ‘soft keyboard’ (meaning the keyboard is an image on the screen and not keys) that I touch to type. Given the size of my fingers and the size of the keyboard you can imagine that some of my words come out unrecognizable. There is a built in auto correct that does a decent job but sometimes my choices are pretty weird (for some amusement – check out Damn You Autocorrect. Warning – not always appropriate for the office). In my case that day I replied to a text message and click the send button and the reply had several auto-corrected words that made it hilarious to read, but NOT what I intended to write. I had to send two more clarifications afterwards.
What’s my point?
The use of smart phone is changing most ways people interact with internet related tasks. Just like my own example above, a smart phone gives you the ability to do many internet related tasks whenever you want. There is one big difference between phone/internet tasks and computer internet tasks, and that is the intention of the user. Someone on a phone typically want to complete an action and not just ‘surf the web’.
Given these stats:
# of people who use the web for research
Searching with a smart phone
What your website looks like on a smart phone.
Offer: Curious what your website looks like on a smart phone? Danan from our sister company Commlines Media will send you a screen shot of your website as seen on different smart phone screens. It’s a good thing to see. Just send him an email with your contact information to Danan@CommlinesMedia.com and he’ll send you a screenshot.
Adam