Beyond Bad Grammar in Corporate Website and Blog Content Writing

As a corporate blogging trainer in Indianapolis, my favorite recommendation to business owners and the freelance blog content writers they hire to help bring their message to their customers is simply this:

Dress your blog in its best. Prevent blog content writing “wardrobe malfunctions” such as grammar errors, run-on sentences, and spelling errors. I counter any observation that most readers won’t catch any errors with this simple question:

 “Can you afford to have even one potential customer noticing your lack of care?”

But as I continue to read hundreds of pages of business blogs and corporate websites each week (a prerequisite for anyone providing business blogging assistance or writing content for websites), I’m noticing something that goes far beyond bad grammar and even beyond lack of care.  I’m finding content on blogs and on websites that’s at least partially incomprehensible.

Here are just four of the many instances of online content I found difficult or impossible to understand. I’ve reproduced each of these paragraphs word for word as they appeared on their respective sites.

1. Supplemental cause to speak over inside using a taxes lawyer is the usefulness it creates.  Not merely might interacting stipulations with an IRS adviser turn into neurologically worrying, yet.
    
2. Wonderful jewelries.  They were so gorgeous and classy too.  I love those jewelries which is so unique with its design.  Choose best jewelry boxes to secure such amazing jewelries.
    
3. Despite of being subject to constant ailing condition, Billy Graham managed to serve the U.S. President in the bestest form. It is just like as if he was ready for this small meeting and after it was regrettably over, Obama made his way to West Virginia to offer his condolences and express his views on the loss of those unfortunate 29 miners, who got killed in a coal mine explosion on April 5th.
    
4. Blogs vary in quality. There are blogs that you can easily label as poorly written immediately after a short glance while other blogs are simply so good that take your breath away. On the other hand, there are those blogs that are good but seem far away to being great – blogs that simply can’t rise from mediocrity.

(This last example is particularly sad, since the subject of the paragraph is poorly written blogs! “Far away to being great”? “So good that take your breath away?”  All I can say is “Huh?”)

I confess that when I began to come across incomprehensible online content, my first “take” was that it must have been created by non-native speakers of the English language. Business owners or professional practitioners had needed content writing help, I concluded, and had chosen to outsource the work overseas to save on costs.

When I learned about “spinned content”, I realized that the “gibberish” effect in some of the incomprehensible text I was finding could well be the work of a computer program, not of some overseas content writer.

Spinned content is reproduced by replacing words with synonyms, for the purpose of re-using content (and repeating keyword phrases) many times with an eye to “winning search”.  As SEO Positive explains, “Since the spinning software cannot discern context or meaning, there is a higher possibility of reconstructing the article into something meaningless.”

Now I have two questions to pose to business owners and professional practitioners:

            “Can you afford to have potential customers noticing your lack of care?”

            “Can you afford to have gibberish associated with your brand?”