Taking care of grammatical mistakes is a must in marketing content. This form of writing involves getting attached to the audience. But the readers won’t feel the engagement if the work isn’t flawless.
Grammar is often the most neglected part of a copy; however, it solely possesses the power to make or break a deal. The readability that a clean grammatical structure brings to a work makes it resonate with people’s minds, compelling them towards your business.
So, it’s necessary to realize the common grammar mistakes that occur in marketing content and deeply analyze your work to fix them.
Ways to Fix Some Common Grammar Errors
Below, we have given some common grammatical errors and how you can find and fix them in your work.
1. Identify And Use The Correct Homonyms
Homonyms are words with the same pronunciation, but different meanings. Mostly, people use the wrong homonyms, which causes a huge blunder in their marketing copy.
Identifying and catching a homonym is easier said than done, however, some examples might help you to get your mind working.
Example:
Son vs. sun
They’re vs. There
Effect vs. Affect
We have identified the above pair of homonyms as increasing levels of difficulty. For the effect vs affect problem, let’s take another example for clarification.
He was affected (verb) by the pain caused to him by his father.
I told her that the stevia leaves had a positive effect (noun) on my health.
2. Ensure Active Voice For Effective Delivery
In active voice, the subject is followed by the verb, clearly indicating what action the subject performed. However, in passive voice, the subject and the verb aren’t always clear in a sentence.
Active: Jake cut the bread in half
Passive: The bread was sliced in half by Jake
Writing in a passive voice isn’t generally a crime, but it is considered as such in copywriting. The reason is that people spend very little time engaging with advertisements.
The usual 2 -4 seconds of the audience’s attention shouldn’t go to understanding the sentence structure type or grammar. Instead, their gaze should be reiterated to commit to a product/service. Hence, rewrite content to active voice to have an effective delivery.
3. Be Keen On Punctuation
Revise the rules and definitions for run-on sentences, misplaced apostrophes, prepositions, and comma splices from a credible dictionary. These are just a few common issues with punctuation that occur more often than others. However, keep an eye out for more such problems.
The edits on punctuation may seem like making insignificant changes. However, addressing these issues surgically improves the readability and clarity of marketing content.
Let’s take an example of a run-on sentence and see how fixing it improves the flow of content.
Example:
Incorrect: “Rewire will watch out for any hazards in the house you do your work.”
Correct: “Rewire will watch out for any hazards in the house, while you do your work.”
4. Ensure Subject-Verb Agreement
Subject-verb agreement means that the subject and the verb must both agree in numbers. For example, a singular verb must have a singular subject, while a plural subject should be with a plural verb.
To understand this concept, let’s consider some examples to help us find and fix these errors in our work.
- John teaches Mathematics in France
- The instructors is very experienced in the school
The first sentence is correct since ‘John’ is a singular subject, and it is indeed paired with a singular verb ‘teaches.’
However, the second sentence is wrong. It contains the plural subject ‘instructors’ with a singular verb ‘is’ instead of ‘are.’
5. Consult A Fresh Pair Of Eyes
If you’re trying your best to spot the grammatical errors in the work and still can’t. Then, we suggest getting help from an external, fresh pair of eyes.
We mean to consult family or friends over your marketing content. Make them read your work and see their reactions. If they’re able to pinpoint some specific grammatical errors, fix them. If not, then move on to the other phase of the project.
However, you must understand that while new members viewing your work can present new perspectives, they must also have the mental capability to judge the technicalities of the content, along with its readability, grammatical errors, and other linguistic parameters.
6. Use Of Online Grammar Checkers
The aforementioned methods are robust for checking grammar; however, they require a lot of time and skill to apply.
Thus, we present an alternative solution to the problem. That is to use an online grammar checker tool to automate the grammar-checking process and allow easy improvements in no time.
Such tools leverage their deep learning algorithms to effectively read the given text and correct the grammar where possible. Let’s take an example to understand the situation better.
Sample text:
A tool that we accessed randomly to check grammar, corrected the errors in the above text as the following.
Hence, online grammar checkers save a lot of time and resources for people and are very easy to use and comprehend for laymen.
Final Thoughts
In this post, we saw different techniques that you can apply to fix hidden grammatical errors in your content. We saw that finding and fixing errors with homonyms, SVA, and sneaky punctuation can significantly improve the writing flow.
Making the marketing content grammatically error-free makes it easier to deliver it to the masses. It can also enable you to leave a lasting impact on the people.
