Silly Spelling and Grave Grammar Mistakes

You can have the best PR strategy or marketing campaign this side of the Atlantic, but if you misspell a word or apply the incorrect use of an apostrophe, it can negatively impact on how you and your business are perceived regardless. The odd typo happens to us all and can usually be recognised as just that, but the obvious use of an incorrect word or spelling is a different kettle of fish entirely, so it’s important to get it right in your communications.

As a team of technically-trained copywriters, journalists and grammarians, we’re often asked for advice, so in this blog we’ve decided to clear up a few of the most common errors we see:

1. Principal and Principle - Principal is both a noun and an adjective, and refers to a position or person, for example a head of a school: ‘Mr Smith was appointed as Principal of the school’. Principle, however, is always a noun and refers to rules and beliefs, for example, ‘the teacher taught us the first principle of social responsibility’.
2. Stationary and Stationery - If something is not moving then it’s stationary with an ‘a’ such as ‘I was stationary in traffic’, while stationery applies to pens, pencils and rulers, for example ‘I ordered some stationery for the office’. One great way to differentiate the two is to think of ‘e for envelope’.
3. Licence and License - The word with a ‘c’ is a noun or a thing, for example, ‘I have a driving licence’, while with an ‘s’ it’s a verb, so ‘you are licensed to run this pub’.
4. Practice and Practise - In exactly the same way, practice is when you repeatedly perform a task to get better at it, or the place where something happens, while practise refers to actually carrying out something. So, a dental practice is the place you go to have your teeth looked after, whilst your dentist should be qualified enough to practise dentistry.
5. Affect and Effect - Most of the time, affect is used as a verb and effect is used as a noun. Affect is to influence or to cause something to happen, so ‘your actions affected me in a bad way’. Effect is the result of something that has happened, so ‘your actions had a bad effect on me’.
6. Enquire and Inquire - The former is used when requesting or looking for information for example, ‘I wanted to enquire about a vacancy’ while the latter, inquire, is used only when talking about investigations, for example, ‘there will be an inquiry into the incident’. (This one is Managing Director Rhiannon’s pet peeve).
7. Compliment and Complement – A compliment is a form of praise, respect or admiration, for example, ‘Rhi received a compliment on her new dress’, whereas complement means to match well with something else, completing or enhancing it, so ‘Rhi’s new dress perfectly complements the colour of her eyes’.
   

We could go on forever with these and we often cringe when reading marketing material - in fact we recently shared some marketing literature on our socials from a well-known hotel chain that had a number of embarrassing mistakes!

We cannot stress enough the impact that poor communications can have on your business brand - in a survey conducted in 2022 by Accuracy Matters it was reported that almost three-quarters of UK adults (73%) said their perceptions of a brand would worsen if they noticed grammatical or spelling mistakes in brand messaging.

Not only can errors lead to confusion about the intended meaning of a message, but they can also result in a lack of credibility in your industry and a negative perception of your company’s professionalism and competence.

Take the well-known SodaStream Super Bowl ad from 2014 for example, which ran at a reported cost of $4 million in air time. A little extra for scriptwriters might have been a good investment too, as the line “less sugar, less bottles” will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. (It should have been fewer bottles, as ‘bottles’ is a countable noun - oops!)

If in doubt, always double check. It simply isn’t worth losing the value of what you’re saying because of a small issue with how you’re saying it.