Editor’s note (April 2025): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in 2014, it has been revised 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 by correctly nailing words that most adults can’t fit into a sentence. In 2014The Scripps National Spelling Bee produced its first co-champions in more than half a century—two kids traded obscure etymological roots under the hot lights. It made headlines not only for the rarity of the result, but because it reminded people that accuracy in language is a real, teachable skill. Someone the rest of us quietly decided wasn’t worth keeping.
Spell check allowed us to stop caring. Autocorrect hardly taught us to look twice. For bloggers — people whose entire professional credibility rests on the written word — that reassurance comes at a more concrete cost than most would like to admit.
Bets are not hypothetical
Cases circulating in writing and editorial circles are instructive because they involve simple mistakes rather than exotic ones. in Canada, Rogers Communications and Alliant embroiled in a contract dispute over a single misplaced comma. The clause in question cost Rogers nearly $1 million—not because of a complicated legal ambiguity, but because of a punctuation error that completely changed the meaning of the sentence. A BBC report from the same period found that a single spelling error on an e-commerce site could cut online sales by nearly half, as visitors interpreted the error as a sign that the site was not trustworthy.
These are not anomalies. This is what happens when the “someone else will catch it” assumption becomes politics.
The stakes for bloggers and independent publishers look different, but they aren’t realistic. You may not be signing million dollar contracts, but you’re building a reputation with every paragraph you publish. Readers make quick confidence assessments. A grammatical error in your headline, a homophone shift in your introduction—”their” where you mean “there,” “you” where you mean “you”—tells the reader something before they get to your argument. It indicates inattention.
Spell check is not a safety net
One of the most persistent misconceptions among new bloggers is that modern writing tools make proofreading optional. They don’t have it. Spell checkers check that a word exists – they don’t confirm that it is a correct word. Think of a sentence like “Please come here.” Drop one letter from each word and you get “I’m asking for it”. Each tagged element is passed as either a valid word or a common abbreviation. The sentence is meaningless, but no automated tool can reliably capture it.
Grammar checkers have improved significantly since 2014. Tools like Grammarly and the AI writing assistants now built into most platforms can flag context-sensitive errors that earlier tools missed. But they still routinely fail in tone-dependent usage, industry-specific expressions, and complex sentences with unusual structures. Relying on them without carefully reading your own work is a different version of the same problem – passing judgment on a system that doesn’t really understand what you mean.
Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, made this point clear in an article Harvard Business Review: won’t hire anyone who uses poor grammar regardless of their technical skills. “If it takes someone over 20 years to use ‘it’ correctly,” he wrote, “then it’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with.” That was over a decade ago. The standard has not dropped.
What this means for content creators in particular
There’s a version of the spelling and grammar conversation that applies to corporate communications, recruiting, and legal documents, and then there’s a version that applies to bloggers, and they’re not the same conversation. For content creators, credibility among readers is not the only issue. This is reliability with systems that distribute your work.
Search engines have improved in terms of language quality. Google’s Helpful Content guideline and its various quality signals consistently show that well-written, clear, error-free content performs better than content that reads as if it’s been rushed or generated by a machine. A blog full of grammatical inconsistencies indicates low editorial investment, which is associated with lower reputation scores in fair or non-competitive search.
The rise of AI-powered writing has further complicated this dynamic. Bloggers are now producing more content than ever before. But AI projects carry their own category of errors: awkward phrasing, misused idioms, homogenized sentence rhythms, and occasional confident errors of fact. Editing AI-generated content requires the same careful reading as editing human-written content—perhaps more so, because AI prose tends to look clean at a glance while hiding sentence-level problems.
Bloggers who take that editing step seriously set themselves apart. Those who don’t are contributing to a general decline in content quality that any reader can feel, even if they can’t always articulate why a piece is invalid.
It is a practical standard, not perfection
None of this is an argument for paralysis or for holding every post to the standards of an academic journal. Blogs are conversational by design. The occasional hyphen used where a comma would be technically correct, a sentence fragment placed for emphasis — these are stylistic choices, not mistakes. The line between sound and clutter is real, and experienced readers know it when they see it.
What matters is the intention. Reading your draft out loud catches mistakes that silent reading misses. Allowing a post to sit for an hour before publishing gives you enough distance to see what’s actually on the page, rather than what you want to put out there. A second pair of eyes – even an unofficial one – remains the most reliable catch for the most important mistakes.
For bloggers running small operations without editorial support, this standard is attainable. The Rogers comma and half-lost sales figures from a decade ago are not cautionary tales about large organizations. They remind you that language does precise work, and that precision is a choice you make before publishing.
Teens at the spelling bee learned something most of us forget: taking language seriously is a form of respect for the reader, the subject, and your own credibility. In a content landscape where volume is cheapening and focus is shrinking, that respect is still one of the few things that reliably differentiates good work.
