Avoiding Spelling & Grammar Issues On Your Website
Grammar issues like spelling and punctuation are the bane of all who want their written word to be understood! When it comes to websites, whether it is your personal project, one you are doing for a friend, or a client, grammar can make or break a visitor’s impression. Misspelled, punctuation mark, or poorly constructed sentence, on a website, while seemingly minor can negatively impact the perception of a brand. Well there are plenty of tools out there that allow you to check your spelling and grammar. Some of the tools you may have been using for years for other purposes.
Grammar and Spell Checking Resources
If you are not an expert AP Style writer, do not guess at punctuation. If you are not absolutely sure if a period goes between the quotation marks or parentheses, don’t guess, look up the correct usage! My favorite website to quickly look up how to use punctuation marks is:
https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/index.html
– This site makes looking up how punctuation should be used very easy. Just click on the punctuation mark on the top of the page. That will display common uses with examples of both correct and incorrect uses of the punctuation mark.
Spell Check A Website
This is a pretty important step for any website. Spelling is fundamental on many angles. Beyond the impression bad spelling will make on a website visitor, misspelling key words and phrases affects search engine optimization. While some can make arguments for tactical misspelling, how to do that is a whole separate discussion.
Free Website Spell Checking Tools
https://datayze.com/website-spell-checker
– Will catch anything that smells like a misspelled word. Sometimes it catches false positives due to how a word may be formatted on the website. Use “FIND” in your browser to quickly to the highlighted fail.
https://www.online-spellcheck.com
– This tool is unique in that it captures the text of a page, displays it in a text-editable box with suspected spelling errors highlighted.
Online – Google Docs
Offline – Microsoft Word
Using your desktop document editor:
While Microsoft Word and other text editors are generally unfriendly to copy and paste from into a website page, they do work well to check grammar and spelling. MS Word will catch many punctuation errors, but I find it more useful to double check overall sentence and grammar construction.
Do not accidentally import Microsoft Word formatting code into your WordPress page or posts!
NOTE: Be careful copying content from Microsoft Word into a WordPress page or post. If you do this in the “Visual” mode, (regardless if you are using the WordPress Classic Editor or a page builder Text Block/Module), you are likely to import formatting code that is not HTML-friendly.
When in doubt, copy from Microsoft Word into a plain text editor like Notepad which will strip out the proprietary formatting code. Then you can post that in either the Visual or Text mode of whatever editor your WordPress application is using.
If necessary you can modify the content with the appropriate HTML tags.
There are quite a few online tools available, the ones listed here are free, generally fast, and don’t make you sign up to see the results.