Good Writing or. Sloppy Copy

What you write anywhere is a sales sample. It doesn't matter whether you contribute to a blog, forum, website, ezine, email or in a printed brochure or other type of publication. I've seen these called "virtual salespeople".

When you write something you want to sell, some proofreading and/or editing is usually necessary. How much easier and faster it goes if the writing is already nearly perfect in punctuation, spelling, capitalization, grammar and syntax. Such good writing is a habit that you can develop. Take advantage of every opportunity to practice good writing, and it will become automatic. Then you can write faster and produce more than one who has to go over and over his/her work simply to get into readable shape.

Sales samples and speed are two great benefits to developing your good writing skills until they become automatic. That's why I often suggest online that people work on those skills if their posts contain obvious and repeated sloppy writing.

This doesn't mean that I denigrate content or demote it to a secondary concern. On the contrary, if you write well from the start, you have more time and energy to concentrate on the content. Granted, I may get a bit carried away, especially advocating letter-perfect emails, but why make sloppy writing a habit with email if you're going to be sending email queries and submissions?

And I'm not beyond making a typo, either, and failing to find it when I preview my posts.