We’ve covered a lot of ground on some pretty in depth subjects so far ranging from the importance of a great default screen to a crash course on fonts and typography. I’m going to take it a little easy on you today with our next step:
Czech You’re Spelingg and Grammer.
I hold myself to a pretty high standard, and consider myself to be a pretty intelligent guy. That said, I sometimes fail when it comes to spelling and grammar. (My wife may disagree on my choice of the word “sometimes.”) With mobile communication on the rise, our language skills are being short circuited by the truncated madness of texting and the caveman speak of Twitter. Look, take a little pressure off of yourself, swallow some pride, and realize that you’re not going to be awesome at everything. Chances are pretty good that unless you were an English major (I don’t know why someone would be, but they’re out there) you probably don’t know enough to catch everything.
We had a church service recently where we had limited instruments and vocals due to some platform construction. Our pastor decided to lead us in some old hymns that hadn’t been in our system. A quick copy and paste from our team got the songs in there, but for some reason stripped out all the punctuation. So instead of the lyrics for When We All Get to Heaven reading “He’ll prepare for us a place,” the screen read “Hell prepare for us a place.” It was…confusing.
So you have to pay attention. Just a few tips:
The red jaggies are your friends. If your worship presentation software doesn’t have a built in spell check, make sure that you’re typing your text in Word or some other program that automatically adds those beautiful red jagged lines under misspelled text.
Get a second set of eyes. It never hurts to have someone review your text or help you with a sentence. Make sure they’re at least equally or more intelligent than you (it may not be as hard as you think).
Basic grammar. Know the difference between your and you’re. Know how to use an apostrophe. My local grocer tries to sell me “grape’s” all the time. Grape’s what? I love grapes, so the opportunity to buy something belonging to them is exciting. I just need more information before making the purchase.
Get some tools. Grab a copy of the Harbrace Handbook (eBay link) or AP Style Guide. Harbrace has for decades been the go-to guide for students when it comes to grammar and English language mastery. The AP Style Guide is used by newspapers, websites, magazines, and just about any other publication you can imagine, and is updated each year to reflect the most current language usage rules. Additionally, you should bookmark the online grammar resource The Grammar Book. (I use this almost every day.)
That’s it for today! Make sure that you’re following me on Twitter or Facebook and grab the RSS feed to be notified when the next post goes up.
(Feel free to correct the grammar in this article. I asked for it…)
