Comparison of the seven sites – notes for Task A and feedback in part 3 of the lesson. Title of site 1. Main mistakes of grammar and spelling. 2. English appropriacy. Abbey Bookkeeping spelled wrongly in site name and name Formal tone is bookeeping of service. relatively well services Missing apostrophes on years, redundant maintained but marred apostrophes on P45’s. by casual idiom “take Blueberries Comparative comparative “more simpler”. them in our stride.” Incomplete sentence starting with which. US English (spellchecker) – staffs. Guide lines as two words. Pronoun reference – take them in our stride (people or tax returns?). Careless punctuation e.g. no ‘ ‘ around yes. Over-‐capitalisation: Office.
Celtic cement and gd-‐graphics barry Peaches
GD graphics: Web site and website – latter is correct. It’s/its classic error. Run-‐on clause sentence. Celtic cement (designed by GD graphics and on their site as an example): Inconsistent use of numbers e.g. 1 and one. Missing comma, crushers, climate change. Wildly overcapitalised e.g. words that ‘look’ important like Replacements. Jeff Lewis Webiste (from a website designer). Text under design portfolio poster and web needs bullets or rewrite, just garble. About page several errors e.g. for mentioned not strawberries aforementioned. I recognises, I specialises – patois?
3. Effect on customer. Dire. This is an accountancy service where customer expects (and pays for) meticulous accuracy. Any educated person would be put off using a service like this. Name of service has connotational links to Abbey National – they should be protesting too! Tone is appropriate but This is a website annoying rhetorical designed to give an question in bold. impession, a good one. These apparently small errors and stylistic irritations add up to off-‐ putting annoyance and detract from the argument. Chatty tone is ‘writing It’s the client’s as speaking’ – needs responsibility to provide higher level of correct copy, but what if formality. the designer can’t produce his own correct copy???
4. Causes of problems Writer of site copy has poor written English. Probably written by one person as mistakes are consistent. Site may have been built by consultant, in which case firm should have proof-‐read copy. A spell and grammar checker would have found many of these issues.
Poor proof-‐reading at approval stage. Most of these errors would not be detected by a spellchecker, unfortunately, so human knowledge required.
Self-‐designed site – needed proof-‐reader.