Language errors can hurt your company’s reputation

(1) An Australian HR firm called Maxumise conducted a study that found bad spelling and poor grammar are hurting your business’s reputation;
(2) The words “amazeballs” and “totes” (for “totally”) were added to the Collins Dictionary.

Do you see the irony?

Just when the widespread lack of basic literacy skills is causing a huge problem for businesses, a valued resource—the dictionary—is legitimizing stupidity.

There is some value in definitions for words such as “hangry,” “bashtag,” and “photobomb,” but these explanations should be freely available only in cyberspace for nosy parents trying to decipher their kids’ Facebook statuses. “Amazeballs” in the 200-year-old Collins Dictionary is literary blasphemy.

With many businesses spending upward of 10 percent of their total revenue on marketing and corporate branding, it can be heartbreaking to have all your hard work and big spending undone by language errors.