Writing Skills Matter–Go Figure!

Grammarly is a site that offers an outstanding, automated grammar checker (it’s like having your very own superb proofreading elf, though I still recommend you hire a professional editor and proofreader before publishing anything).

Grammarly recently surveyed about 450 freelance professionals. Surprise! Writing well matters. Employers rated the freelancers, then folks at Grammarly checked the writing skills of the freelancers. They found those rated highest by the employers were also those who wrote well. Perhaps not surprisingly, IT and programming professionals as well as finance management professionals had the most mistakes in their writing.

Here is the handy-dandy infogram that spells it all out for you. Spells! Get it? (Click on it if you can’t read it clearly, then use the magnifying glass that magically appears to zoom in closer, ok?)

So listen up, kiddos. If you want to be successful in a majority of fields and want to get paid the big bucks, then you need to do more than post an emoticon on Facebook or pack a fistful of hashtags into a tweet. You need to write good. I mean, of course, well. Write well and the world will beat a path to your door and shower you with hundred dollar bills. Or something like that.

And now for my favorite comic strip and a writer who did not write well but decided he wrote good anyway. (Jefferson Smith’s cartoon archive available here.)