Write exceedingly well and you'll increase your chances of succeeding in your workplace and in the job market. Write poorly and you'll increase the burden of work for your colleagues and be seen as potentially expendable in economic downturns. That's just how it is.
This is doubly true if you're a PR professional or journalist. In both cases, good writing ability should be a point of entry and not an aspirational goal. If you've ever edited PR copy or journalism professionally, you may have learned that this is sometimes not the case. PR and journalism attracts people who say they love to write, but many of them apparently feel it's fine to wing it with grammar, spelling, capitalization and punctuation.
While they wing it, others labor to clarify their sentences and paragraphs, rid them of errors and keep their style consistent. Wing it with your writing and you're narrowing some career horizons.
Many PR pros know this to be true—we can see this at PR News from the many people who sign up for our Writing Boot Camps. Judging by the availability of online grammar tools, insecurity about writing ability goes far beyond PR and journalism to the general workforce. One such tool, Grammarly, scored a lot of attention online last week when it published an infographic called "The MLB Grammar Power Ranking," in which it ranked Major League Baseball teams by their fans' ability to write with the fewest grammar, punctuation and spelling errors. (Cleveland Indians fans came in first, with 3.6 errors per 100 words; New York Mets fans were last, with 13.9 errors per 100 words.)
The infographic and ensuing media coverage—including this post—has raised awareness for Grammarly, which offers three paid plans in which you can use its online program to proofread your copy, improve your word choices, avoid plagiarism and minimize grammatical and punctuation mistakes.
I've never used Grammarly. Perhaps I should. I am convinced, though, that this is not the entryway to the kind of excellent writing that'll make a difference in your professional life. It's probably a very useful tool, but depending on technology is not the way.
Commit to being your own writing teacher first, then pay for the tool and sign up for the class. Don't wing it with punctuation, capitalization and grammar. Get copies of Strunk and White's Elements of Style, The Associated Press Stylebook and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and never stop referring to them. Be your own editor and keep rewriting your sentences. Develop that ability first, so that when a trainer, author or computer program exhorts you to avoid walls of text and make every verb count, you're already on the endless road to writing a little bit better with every passing week.
—Steve Goldstein, @SGoldsteinAI