Seth Godin has a blessedly concise little thought on his blog concerning the misuse of language in marketing material. When you're done here, go check it out.

So, here's the gist: Seth stops just short of posing the question, "Are your customers assuming you're stupid because you have poor grammar, or misuse quotes and apostrophes?" I would add to that misusing homonyms and 10-Cent words in general.

Perhaps, as Seth asserts, it is a moral failing on my part, but I do snap to judgment when I when I see there/their/they're misused or its/it's or any other confusion of possessive, plural, or combination thereof. It may not be fair of me, but I do assume that someone who misuses homonyms doesn't read a whole lot. Why? Because there is no difference between there, their, and they're if your engagement with the language is auditory. So, how does that affect my interaction with those people? I write shorter e-mails when I correspond with them. I express myself as concisely as possible. I leave the 10-Cent words in their drawer. I keep metaphor and simile to a minimum. Perhaps it's wrong of me, but I feel it's important to take as many attempts as possible to make sure they a) make it all the way through the e-mail, and b) don't misunderstand anything in it.

I may take this a bit to an extreme. Really, it's something I did without thinking until very recently. I noticed it myself a few days ago when I was corresponding with a client who was misusing a lot of homonyms and printing industry terms, which was causing compounding miscommunications. As the conversation got longer, my e-mails got simpler, and hers got clearer.

This is all a long way to go for a simple point: Seth and I are not alone. We ALL, including the people who may become your customers, rush to judgment using simple, perhaps overly simple, criteria. We need to do this. It's how we manage to weed through the overloading amount of information we're presented with.

We look for anything to help us sort the information into the "things to consider" and "things to ignore" piles. For grammarians, apostrophes and quotes are an easy indicator. For other people it's design, brand name, ease of use, or technical features.

The trick, it seems, is to exclude as few people as possible, and appeal the most to the people you're really after, when you're marketing. So, although you might not be selling a book on grammar, it's important to be correct. Grammarians need cell phones too...and they eat BBQ, and they get their car washed. Not only that, but people other than english teachers and writers and fussy busy-bodies get annoyed when people get simple things like apostrophes wrong.

To check out Seth's original, much more concise post, follow the link:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/07/am-i-the-only-one-distracted-by-apostrophes-and-weird-quoting.html

Upodate: A Friend of mine from college contacted me via twitter to inform me that I had misspelled judgment all over this post. I had used a variant spelling, judgement, which is totally acceptable according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, but not very common in "North American English." I guess it goes to show you, people other than writers notice this stuff, and care about it.