Just one slip

Research carried out with business websites shows that even one spelling mistake can potentially halve your sales (go into the Comments section for a hysterically funny spellchecked poem) - and the inimitable David Crystal takes that as his cue to talk about the impression given by poor or non-native English and how it helps him to detect phishing emails.

People are very ready to make deductions about the background of a user based on language use, and the argument 'carelessness in spelling must mean carelessness generally (and thus an unsatisfactory product)' is applied regardless of the realities.

Harsh, but almost certainly true, and even more so for people whose business is language.

I've noticed this before with the 'Postcode Lottery' and attempts to con people into sending money by hacking an email account and asking for wire transfers after the account owner ran into fictitious problems on a fictitious holiday, which fell on far too sensitive ears when an email in broken English was sent to a translators' mailing list. (The other translators could accept the odd typo if the person in question really had been robbed at gunpoint, but not the use of American English.)