Relax. I did it on porpoise.

BOOM. Gotcha twice there didn’t I?

Spelling matters. Seriously.

If I’m going to stare at ten almost identical agencies and try to choose one, I’m initially concerned not with which one to pick, but which ones to discard (and I’m not too fussy about how I get there).

In the past, I can remember dumping candidate agencies simply because I didn’t like the individuals, their presentation style, their hair, their choice of font… THAT’S how desperate I was to get from ten to three options.

Another REALLY easy way to get dumped is to misuse a hyphen or semicolon. Sadly for anyone presenting to me specifically, I was a journo and writer for about a decade before I moved into PR and then marketing so I was super-hot on such things. And you should be too.

The good news is, there is REALLY no excuse for spelling anything incorrectly these days. If your software of choice isn’t already highlighting and underlining each and every questionable choice, you need to change your processes.

Often these days we’re writing directly into a secondary piece of software (as we speak I’m typing into Squarespace rather than a piece of word processing software).

However, you might find you’re often tripped over when going direct to browser, in which case you should get yourself Grammarly (which brilliantly I just spelled incorrectly and it stepped in, proving my point!)

Fat fast fingers (or a lack of education) WILL ensure you misspell words. It happens. It’s not the end of the world, but PLEASE don’t give me a good reason to remove you from the candidate pile; we could have been great together (and it’s all your fault “we” didn’t happen).

Hoppy haunting.