There are three C’s to good writing: you have to be correct, you have to use compelling language, and you have to be consistent.
Consistency is the big bugaboo for businesses. It’s amazing to me how often I’ll come across a business whose very name varies from page to page to page, a business whose business name is different online and -off, a business whose business name is not the same from one employee bio to another.
I’ve never seen a worse (or, I suppose, better) example of this kind of sloppy writing than I saw yesterday on behalf of a company called Schoox, a company that—get this—provides online training for many different industries. The writing itself is pretty awful, and that’s no big surprise: these people can’t even figure out the name of their business, so why expect them to know how to spell!
Here’s how its name (a stupid, made-up name) is spelled by its employees; notice that a couple of sentences contain other misspelled words in the same sentence:
Spelling #1: My goal in Schoox is to create a delightful, meaningful mobile experience putting people first nad making learning a pleasure
Spelling #2: Every problem has a solution, here in schoox we find it and solve it via cooperatation, communication and fun.
Spelling #3: Working at SchooX provides an awesome environment with great people that changes the way people learn.
And here’s how BNI International, an entity that doesn’t have any employees (you heard me) who can write their way out of a paper sack, spells Schoox:
Spelling #4: Your registration has been confirmed. Please click here to enter schooX
Since neither the employees nor its customers knew how to spell its name, I went on to its “legal page” and discovered that the name seems to contain an uppercase “S” and then lowercase for the rest: Schoox.
This kind of top-to-bottom confusion about something as basic as how to represent the name of a company in print is less than impressive, and, for a company that claims to be focused on helping other people learn, it’s laughable.
Looks to me like Schoox needs some schoolin’, which makes its online offerings…suspect.
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