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Confusing Language |
In any published media, you are attempting to communicate with your audience. Regardless of whether you are selling a product, providing a resource for information, or even just creating something entertainment, if your audience can not understand you, they will leave, and look for some other source for whatever they came to your site for.
First, you must decide upon your intended audience. For example, if you are writing a web site about rabbits intended to provide medical reference to veterinarians, it may be appropriate to refer to them as "Leporidae", but on a website entertaining young children with stories about them, that would not be the best way to refer to them. Similarly, the site for young children could easily include references to "Fuzzy Bunnies", but it's very unlikely that a veterinarian would take a site that used such terminology seriously as an information resource.
In any formal communication, it is important to make a positive impression on your audience. Internet based communications such as email and web sites are no exception to this! Presenting a message to your audience that is poorly spelled, or has poor grammar causes you to appear less competent. If you give a poor impression to your audience, then you have lost customers and credibility. Further, if your audience already has difficulty with the language your site is written in, they may not be able to decipher what your statements are actually intended to mean, if you are not careful to make sure what you wrote is actually what was intended.
While some internet-based communication methods such as instant messengers like ICQ, or chat programs like IRC do encourage users to type their message and send it away as quickly as possible in a somewhat informal manner, Email and Web Sites are something which the user has time available to ensure that their message is delivered as a whole, and properly the first time. Email messages, Blog entries, and web pages are generally entered as a whole message, and then sent off to their target audience, meaning that there is time available to check your spelling - most email programs now come with spelling checkers built in, and when editing a web page, there is plenty of time available between when you write the page, and when it must be posted on the internet, which means that you can also easily make use of the spelling and grammar checking programs built into most modern word processing software such as OpenOffice, or Microsoft Office, and even some advanced text editing programs such as Crimson Editor. Remember however, that if using a word processor like MS Word or OpenOffice, you should make sure to turn off "SmartQuotes" (the feature in many word processors which replaces plain quotes (") with fancy opening and closing quotes, (“ ”) and do not use the "save as HTML" function in the word processor.
When two or more words sound almost the same, they are called Homonyms. In web sites, as in any formal communication, it is very important to make sure you do not write out one word, when you really meant another, as it can completely change the meaning of your statement. For example, "Your car" means "The car that belongs to you", but "You're car" means "You are a car!" - a seemingly simple mistake which can cause embarrassing results, especially in a web site being produced for a corporate client.
Worse than Homonym errors, are errors of laziness - where people use one or two letters to represent some word, because they feel it is "close enough", for example the practice of using the letter "U" by itself to represent the word "you". This does not actually save any significant amount of time (the letters "y" and "o" are both within an inch of the "u" on the keyboard, in the same row) and makes you look both unprofessional, and uneducated. Nothing will sink your presentation of a finished website to the head of a wealthy company faster than giving him the opinion that you have not yet graduated from grade school. The origin of this particular problem comes from IRC and instant messaging systems, where people who type very slowly wanted a way to express themselves at a rate that would allow them to keep up some semblance of a conversation, and in that context, it may be perfectly acceptable. In formal correspondence such as e-mail and web pages however, the immediate rush factor is not present. You have the time to not only run a spell-checking program on your work, but also to actually look for those other few letters in the word you are trying to use, so there is no excuse for using such abbreviations there.
Last, is the increasing practice of making up your own acronyms for random strings of connected words. This tends to confuse your readers, and interrupt the flow of your text as the reader has to go back and try to figure out what that particular acronym stands for. The only acronym you really need is DMUANUY! (Don't Make Up Acronyms - Nobody Understands You!)
Below is a list of some of the common words which are abused in the ways described above. Please make sure you don't do the same in your own work!
Further examples of words commonly miss-used can be found on Wikipedia, here, and here.