Editor’s note (April 2025): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in 2014, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
It’s truly humbling to watch two teenagers compete in a national spelling bee, correctly nailing words that most adults couldn’t place in a sentence. In 2014, the Scripps National Spelling Bee produced its first co-champions in over half a century — two kids trading obscure etymological roots under hot lights. It made headlines not just for the rarity of the outcome, but because it reminded people that precision with language is a real, trainable skill. One that the rest of us had quietly decided wasn’t worth maintaining.
Spell-check gave us permission to stop caring. Autocorrect taught us to barely look twice. And for bloggers — people whose entire professional credibility rests on the written word — that complacency carries a cost that’s more concrete than most want to admit.
The stakes aren’t hypothetical
The cases that circulate in writing and editorial circles are instructive precisely because they involve simple mistakes, not exotic ones. In Canada, Rogers Communications and Aliant became embroiled in a contract dispute over a single misplaced comma. The clause in question cost Rogers approximately $1 million CAD — not because of complex legal ambiguity, but because of one punctuation error that changed the sentence’s meaning entirely. A BBC report from the same era found that a single spelling mistake on an e-commerce site could cut online sales by roughly half, as visitors interpreted the error as a sign the site wasn’t trustworthy.
These aren’t anomalies. They’re what happens when the assumption that “someone else will catch it” becomes policy.
For bloggers and independent publishers, the stakes look different but they’re no less real. You may not be signing million-dollar contracts, but you are building a reputation with every paragraph you publish. Readers make quick trust assessments. A grammatical error in your headline, a homophone swap in your introduction — “their” where you meant “there,” “you’re” where you meant “your” — signals something to the reader before they’ve even gotten to your argument. It signals carelessness.
Spellcheck is not a safety net
One of the most persistent misconceptions among newer bloggers is that modern writing tools have made proofreading optional. They haven’t. Spell-checkers verify that a word exists — they don’t verify that it’s the right word. Consider a sentence like “Please come here.” Drop one letter from each word and you get “Pleas com her.” Every flagged item either passes as a valid word or a common abbreviation. The sentence is gibberish, but no automated tool will catch it with confidence.
Grammar-checkers have improved substantially since 2014. Tools like Grammarly and the AI writing assistants now embedded in most platforms can flag context-sensitive errors that earlier tools missed. But they still fail regularly on tone-dependent usage, industry-specific phrasing, and compound sentences with unusual structures. Relying on them without reading your own work carefully is a different version of the same problem — outsourcing judgment to a system that doesn’t understand what you’re actually trying to say.
Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, made the point bluntly in a piece for Harvard Business Review: he won’t hire anyone who uses poor grammar, regardless of technical skill. “If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use ‘it’s,'” he wrote, “then that’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with.” That was over a decade ago. The standard hasn’t lowered.
What this means for content creators specifically
There’s a version of the spelling-and-grammar conversation that applies to corporate communications, hiring, and legal documents — and then there’s the version that applies to bloggers, and they’re not the same conversation. For content creators, the issue isn’t just credibility with readers. It’s credibility with the systems that distribute your work.
Search engines have grown sophisticated about language quality. Google’s Helpful Content guidance and its various quality signals consistently indicate that well-written, clear, error-free content performs better over time than content that reads as rushed or machine-generated. A blog littered with grammatical inconsistencies signals low editorial investment, which — fairly or not — tends to correlate with lower authority scores in competitive search.
The rise of AI-assisted writing has made this dynamic more complicated. Bloggers now produce more content faster than ever before. But AI drafts carry their own category of errors: awkward phrasing, misused idioms, homogenised sentence rhythm, and occasional confident wrongness about facts. Editing AI-generated content requires the same close reading that editing human-written content does — perhaps more so, because AI prose tends to look clean at a glance while hiding problems at the sentence level.
The bloggers who take that editing step seriously are differentiating themselves. The ones who don’t are contributing to a general decline in content quality that every reader can sense, even if they can’t always articulate why a piece feels untrustworthy.
A practical standard, not a perfectionist one
None of this is an argument for paralysis or for holding every post to the standard of an academic journal. Blogs are conversational by design. The occasional dash used where a comma would technically be correct, a sentence fragment deployed for emphasis — these are stylistic choices, not errors. The line between voice and sloppiness is real, and experienced readers know it when they see it.
What matters is intentionality. Reading your draft out loud catches errors that silent reading misses. Letting a post sit for an hour before publishing creates enough distance to see what’s actually on the page rather than what you meant to put there. A second pair of eyes — even an informal one — remains the most reliable catch for the mistakes that matter most.
For bloggers running small operations without editorial support, that standard is achievable. The Rogers comma and the half-lost sales figures from a decade ago aren’t cautionary tales about large institutions. They’re reminders that language does precise work, and that precision is a choice you make before you hit publish.
The teenagers at the spelling bee understood something most of us have forgotten: that taking language seriously is a form of respect — for the reader, for the subject, and for your own credibility. In a content landscape where volume has become cheap and attention remains scarce, that respect is one of the few things that still reliably sets good work apart.
The way someone handles being corrected in a comment thread can be surprisingly telling about how safe they feel being wrong in general