The accuracy and correctness of your grammar and spelling might not mean anything to you, but, to those who read your emails or reports, your presentation is very much who you are as a professional person.

If the sales rep in email continually confuses and misspells “their/there/they’re,” we wonder where they went to school and how much they learned there. Confusing “it’s/its,” “effect/affect,” or “site/sight/cite” shows the writer to be uneducated, which reflects on the person’s professionalism. To say, “The principle benefit of our product…,” (rather than the correct, “The principal (or main) benefit…”) is to say to the reader that the writer misses important details and may be missing details in other areas as well. Professional people learn these details and practice their correct usage as a fundamental part of demonstrating competence and attention to quality.

If a sales rep routinely misses with sentence construction and comma usage, the reader marks that as a sign of sloppiness or not caring. One doesn’t need to know what an “independent clause” is to know that you punctuate a sentence with a capital letter and a full stop. That is fundamental to a correct presentation of English language for professional business people. When two sentences are separated by only a comma, from grade school we were taught to call this a “comma splice” and to avoid such an error and the “red” pen that marks it on the paper. If two sentences run together with no punctuation between them, again, we are taught since grade school that this is a “run-on sentence” that should be avoided.

Yet, far too often, in the communication of sales professionals, who in every way are trying to impress the client and work toward the trust and confidence needed to make the sale, we find grammar and spelling errors that mark the person as slopping and unthinking or, perhaps, just not well educated or not competent. The fundamentals of grammar and spelling, in a sales person’s limited and focused line of work, are very few, leaving the person no excuse to be anything other than correct in language use in emails or reports.