Ed Howes writes:

I’m leaning with Chris on this. As much as we might not like it, appearances matter and a lot of time and effort is invested to create a positive one. There are enough ways to create catchy titles and the summary/intros allow us all one more shot to entice a reader that misspelled titles are neither necessary nor desirable.

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Louie Latour writes:

I think misspelling should not be allowed in the title; however, I think the keywords should be fair game.

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Linda Dessau writes:

I agree with you, Chris. I think that it’s very important that we portray ourselves credibly and professionally – both the EzineArticles website as a whole, and each of us as individual authors.

Typos happen to the best of us. Thank goodness for the ability to revise our content on your site!

Keep up the great work!
Linda Dessau

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gracepub writes:

Is it possible to add spelling mistakes in the keywords? I have heard both sides of this debate, and no one really seems to have any idea.

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David Saunders writes:

I prefer that EzineArticles.com is a source of quality articles. Misspellings, regardless of why, are a sign of poor quality. Next we’ll be debating if the poor grammar of an article run through articlebot is appropriate because it catches certain SE queries.

The one exception would be an article written about a misspelling or a misused phrase.

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Marco writes:

I think mis-spellings should not be allowed in the title because quality issues. Otherwise, people could also add misspellings in the body too.

Eitherway, most search engines are moving towards handling misspellings anyways.

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

I agree. Keywords for the Meta tags are fair game for mis-spellings.

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neeraj writes:

I think misspelling should n’t be allowed Because this is a place for getting high quality information.
if it is allowed, people will start using all wrong methods just to attract traffic towards their site

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Ramon Greenwood writes:

Stick to your guns. Misspelling should not be allowed. There is enough damage already being inflicted on the English language
without deliberate pollution.

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Ariane Benefit from NeatLiving.Net writes:

I agree with you Chris, I place all my articles here because of the quality standard. Being a stickler for quality in the longrun is what makes your site a provider of choice to quality publishers!

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Jennifer A. Thieme writes:

My vote: no misspellings.

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Edward Weiss writes:

I have a webpage where I list piano sheet music. The URL of this webpage is misspelled as sheetmusic.html

It gets a TON of hits!

Little did I know that a lot of people spell sheet music as one word. Lucky for me!

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Fran Watson writes:

Hi Chris

I agree. No misspelling of titles for EzineArticles. People can do what they want with keywords on their webpages.

Fran Watson

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Mohammed Magdy writes:

Yes Chris, Iam with you, No mis-spelling.

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Pamela Beers writes:

Glad to know you have high standards. Writers need to catch a reader’s eyes with a good title, not a mis-spelled one. If a writer cannot utilize words effectively, then they shouldn’t be writing.

If I see a mis-spelled word, I won’t read article.

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Michael Russell writes:

Definitely maintain the quality and do not allow it.

People can target mispellings via PPC campaigns if they are desperate :-)

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Lance Winslow writes:

I completely disagree and believe miss spellings should be allowed. Because many people miss key strokes and then end up having to re-submit the search. Besides there are many common miss spellings which are so common that they are considered normal and where do you draw the line anyway. Not to mention that the English versions of words are often different slightly and you might miss all those potential article views. I think linear and stupid people often want to make rules before they think through the repurcussions of the rules they make. For instance BioDiesel is not a word in the dictionary. Bio Diesel shows up as correct but most articles in science use BioDiesel and so let’s say you allow this either way. You just broke your stupid rule. So with this example where do you draw the lines? NanoTech, NanoTube, Behaviour. How about Hurricane Names? Eduardo, Catrina, etc. So, it that over the line? Or are you assisting people in getting to where they really want to go today? This petty crap about quality control is silly. It is more like “mind control” and social engineering to make everything and everyone the same. Plus there are new words being created every day by Instant Messengers too. Industries create words. I create words too, that better describe things I am discussing. I think you people are all insane and your BS about quality is an excuse for the beehive world you wish to create.

This is the same problem in Washington DC with regulators making rules based on how they think the world should do business rather than realizing how the world really works. Your miss spellings and stupid rules are pathetic, linear thinking and very ignorant really. I think you are all jumping on the band wagon wanting to agree with The Knight and soon to be King Chris and you better be careful that you do not get what you wish for. Be smart stop making rules in the middle of the chess game. What are all you folks suddenly a bunch of lawyers now?

And in all this miss spelling rule-making crap, you will then have to make definitions of what really is a miss spelled word? Will it be arbitrary? I cannot tell you how many times my MS Word program shows a miss spelled word things like Franchisor, which is the industry definition of how it appears, but MS Word marks it wrong. But if I spell it Franchiser, which the spell check likes then no one in the industry will find it, because that is not how it is used. I think you are all linear thinking humans without a real mind to think thru the process, but one can someone expect from a bunch of Prozac induced, depressed, sleep deprived, alcoholic writers who do not work for any actual publication because you could not make it in the real world? HMMM? What’s the matter you cannot handle the truth? Huh?

Instead you want to make rules without thinking and I can name 100 examples of words, which are used in common English, search engine searchers and everyday speech, but are either not actually recognized words. And you can pick up any newspaper, white paper, industry trade journal and find at least 5 words per column that would show miss spellings, but are completely within the bounds of reality and not purposely miss spelled. Meanwhile there are many words which are miss spelled so often they in fact become the norms. All of you are wrong on this and show your complete ignorance and I am ashamed to be associated with you in any way. You are linear thinking and are not understanding reality. Grow up.

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Lance Winslow writes:

For Case Study Analysis of the Miss Spelled Titles on Online EzineArticles;

Okay so here is the deal. I have 5580 articles or 161 pages of titles and I have here some 220 Titles with theoretically miss spelled words. Personally some might have a problem with this, I sure as Sheet don’t. Of these words many are industry words or words in everyday speech, the news, newspapers, scientific words. A few are purposely miss spelled and about 10% are mistakes frightful indeed, makes one look bad, however if there are 22 mistakes in Titles of 5500 articles, I can accept that error of .05% that is ISO 9000 certifiable or Six Sigma Black Belt quality. Of the purposely miss spellings as an experiment during Hurricane Season to pump up the click thrus there are 5%. And yes it did work well, not significantly, but it did bring traffic. Is that gaming the search engines? Perhaps, yet if this site did better in the search engines then I would not have tried that experiment; nevertheless that is only 11 articles out of 5500.

Next I wish to point out that using miss spelled words by dictionary definition is one thing, then there are Brand Names and brand names which become words like Kleenex or ‚¬“I FedEx’ed it‚¬ or ‚¬“Make a Xerox of this Please‚¬ and then there are inventa-words too. All of which is to be considered writer’s prose or even free speech. I believe that the argument against miss spelled words is a lousy one, unless utterly abused in every article for the sole intention of gaming the search engines. However percentages should account for something too. I think making a rule against miss spellings is wrong and too arbitrary unless it is being radically abused. Further it is rule making for the sake of making rules that is very bad for progressive thinking and writing. Below are my ‚¬“Miss Spelled Words in the 220 titles of my 5580 articles as of today. I take personal offense to this rule making policy and find it an attack on my Freedoms as a Writer. If I wanted to follow a bunch of meaningless rules I would move to Iran.

Ezine, Franchisor, Franchisors, Islamics, Moussoui, Battlespace, Illegals, Jihadism, Cellulosic, BioTech, BioRefinery, BioFuel, BioDiesel, BioMass, BioEthics, Gitmo, Bloggers, Blogger, Blog’esque, Motorhome, Lawyering, Globalists, UAVs, SAMs, MAVs, AUVs, UUVs, Transexuality, Victimhood, Brimestoners, Stur, Haptics, Hottie, Pretenda, Tribrid, Tri-Brid, Windcar, SolarCar, SpaceHab, Expandables, Weaponizing, Clearcoats, Homeschooling, Vengence, Tornatic, Vibrational, Microsofters, Pre-emptively, Quran, Assume’ees, Switcheroo, SmartDust, NanoTube, NanoTech, Leakers, Telematic, Terraforming, Meth, Pharma, Spyware, Friggin, Diasters, ebooks, iPod, SmartCar, Subdermal, Steerable, Nano-Carbon, Trackable, Marketeers, Xbox, eyebud, ExoSkeleton, Breathalizer, Yippie, Toushy, LadyBug, Informercials, Ecommerce, Cozemel, BioSystem, Gama, Hurricaner, Teleseminars, Networker, Frappachino, Frapachino, Hurricanr, Troplica, Tropocal, Gulfstream, Delisted, Nanomites, Multitrician, opportunties, Quadrangulation, Vence, Vense, Unserved, Hoardes, BMPs, Exo, Jihadists, Atta, SuperPlume, Frappachinoes, Antone, Unperfect, Insighting, Bonzai, Delist, Delisting, SOX, Sar-Ox, Goo, EcoTerrorist, Dionized, Medicade, Commoditizing, Polination, Motherships, Stategies, Imput, Taser, Demonstrater, Magnetics, Hypomaniacs, SpongeBob, deparment, DownTown, LapTop, Realationships, ShopVac, MicroEncapsulation,

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Dina at Wordfeeder.com writes:

Oh, come on, Lance. You know I support your out-of-the-box thinking but please get your ego out of this debate. You’re just being disagreeable, maybe because you know you’re not the greatest speller, or maybe you just want to rile people up for sport?

Poor spelling in your articles doesn’t matter so much because now EzineArticles offers spell check on every one.

Obvious misspellings (or is it mis-spellings?) detract from quality and professionalism.

Furthermore, without spelling and grammar rules to guide our communication, context changes and meaning is lost. Something as simple as a comma omission can seriously wreck your intended message.

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Karen Cohen writes:

As a strong proponent of out-of-the-box thinking and the fostering of creativity I have swayed a bit from my initial opinions on this subject. My suspiciousness of rules and regulations also lead me to agree that perhaps a rule is an over-reaction. If Lance is comfortable with his work being riddled with mis-spellings beyond technical, industry and invented vocabulary, I don’t have a problem with him. I don’t enjoy reading much of his writing because of it – I find the mis-spellings distracting and take away from his work. No matter.. a petty issue, as Lance has stated.

I personally feel uncomfortable with my work full of mis-spellings (again, beyond those ‘special’ words). I feel unprofessional otherwise, and I do hold some judgement towards other’s work in this regard as well. If the author is brilliant in some other regard or there is some other mitigating circumstance (like trying to be an article machine and create a ‘record’), I may internally give them a ‘pass’.

I cannot give a pass to the nastiness contained in Lance’s posts. The interesting and valid points are so overshadowed by the insults and acid tongue-lashing. What’s with the bitterness? The argument was expressed well and convincingly with the low-brow jabs deleted. I did not see any character attacks in the first 15 posts. I guess somebody is cranky and has a thin skin!

Come on…

“I think you are all linear thinking humans without a real mind to think thru the process, but one (sic) can someone expect from a bunch of Prozac induced, depressed, sleep deprived, alcoholic writers who do not work for any actual publication because you could not make it in the real world? HMMM? What’s the matter you cannot handle the truth? Huh?”

Intelligent conversation? Huh?

I agree with some of your points buddy, but you ain’t talking about me, and I don’t appreciate it. You don’t need to lose your humanity in the argument. Dina is right, get your ego out of this and make your points cleanly. Glad to see a debate and opposing ideas, but let’s clean up the bile. Thanks.

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Jennifer Thieme writes:

Misspellings arise from ignorance; coining a new word arises from real thought. They should not be regarded as the same thing. If misspellings were allowed, ingorance would become more prevelant than it already is.

A good editor can tell the difference between an educated author who is coining a new word, and an uneducated author who doesn’t care enough to use a dictionary or the spell check.

One’s attention to detail is an indication of one’s care of the audience. Spelling mistakes, along with other types of usage mistakes, are taxing to the reader. Why turn your readers off with those types of errors? There are some authors here who consistenly use poor syntax and spelling, and even they may have something relevant to say, I no longer read them, because WHAT one says is as important as HOW one says it.

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Pamela Beers writes:

Jennifer Theime is right on! An author needs to think about his/her audience. I enjoy reading grammatically correct articles with a positive tone on just about any subject. Anything short of quality, concise writing is not worth my time.

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Robert Berman writes:

As I see it, enzinearticles is supposed to be a “quality” article site. The quality of an article’s content is subjective, however poor grammar and spelling is not. The site has a ‚¬“quality‚¬ label as well as the articles that the authors produce. I liken this to a few bad cops and all of a sudden everyone is saying that the whole police force is corrupt.

As an author, I don’t appreciate the few authors that believe that enzinearticles is their personal venue. Lance, the man who spouts free enterprise, all of a sudden, when it doesn’t suit him, is saying that an enterprise does not have the right to set its own terms and conditions for doing business. Somewhat hypocritical!

REMEMBER THIS IN 2006

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Lance Winslow writes:

Okay, well lets talk about half the things that many of these authors are peddling. How much of it is just borderline fraudulent? They are not industry gurus, some are. As far as spelling or grammar, I think personally I would hold off on labeling someone ignorant from such. Did you know that all but one of the billionaires in the US before 1970 had attended College and most did not finish HS? I find that most writers are liberal whiners, I do not find them to be of right mind or even viable as experts, way too linear. Those who can’t write so how many of the 30,000 people could not perform in the real world so they spout their writings? To me that is proof of ignorance.

Here we have a cross breed it seems. We have some liberal writers and some small business folks peddling their wares and some who are simply sharing writing and experiences. Each writer has a personal reason for doing what they do and the ego of the writers in these comments is silly. So high and mighty; Perfection at all costs. Yet in the end much of the garbage on this site is just nothingness or repeated industry filler like in the trade journals. What is the point? Many of the folks here have some ridiculous worthless website selling something. Personally I do a lot of reading and find most news media, books, magazine articles so riddled with garbage who cares if they spell anything right because the content sucks?

As a non-writer type I find it fascinating to psychologically profile all the writers, as most of these folks are not very devout about their writing, but like to think they are? So they write 100 articles and call themselves a writer? That is weak really, no offense to those who are working to achieve it, but most of the writers write very few articles and most of them are regurgitated knowledge they read somewhere? That does not take a whole lot of thought and spouting the industry party lines is just not worthy, there are enough people out there already doing that. Now all these writers want to go and make rules about miss-spellings in Titles of articles? Give it a rest, that is just whining, who cares.

If someone is miss spelling all the titles for search engine gaming then kick them out of the system. But making some rule for no reason is for weak-minded government regulators who have never done anything in their lives. If many writers find company with that sort of mindset, I feel it my duty to judge them by the company they keep. Most writers have psychological problems and this is a known fact; they are the most apt to be on drugs, alcoholics, moody and anti-social. And if this is the case, why should we listen to them when they tell the rest of us how to live and wish to force rules on all of us? No wonder the attacks on the Press Secretary, you cannot please a bunch of writers, they are a persnickety group of underachievers, who complain and piss and moan about everything and will not get off their butts to do anything about it. Sure the pen might be mightier than the sword and the word processor is therefore a machine gun of sorts. But writers need to rethink their positions and stop shooting themselves in the foot and at the mirror, because to me they look rather jaded in their reflections.

Spelling is irrelevant totally to life on Earth. True creative people do not bother to worry about spelling, for them the message is paramount not the ever changing human language, besides English is botched language and a miss match of unlikely word conversions. Additionally half your ancestry could not spell their own names and your family names have changed spelling too, check the records on your own ancestry lineage. Perfect spelling is so Status Quo and so in the box. Go ahead and spell all your words perfectly, meanwhile look at the score board; 5600 articles and 1.5 Million article views and only 15% of those articles were done with voice activated software assist. I win; this argument and the game; Score Board!

Stop arguing with me, and start upping your article volumes and stop trying to be so perfect it makes you look uptight, stuffy and well professional. Tell me do you all wear a tie and 3-piece suit when you write these little articles of yours? Well do you? Half you people are writing these articles in your casual street clothes or underwear, don’t deny it? You are all hypocrites and are exhibiting weakness and are not performing at optimum. We need a war on halfwits, mediocrity and whiners.

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Edward Weiss writes:

If anyone here is a therapist, I think Lance could use a little help – and some prozac too!

Calm down dude! The world’s not out to get you. I guess there’s a lot of pressure when you’re the #1 article writer in the world. So much to prove and accomplish.

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Robert Berman writes:

Lance – Now that you have babbled your way through an incomprehensible thought process that relates spelling and grammar to billionaires before 1970 and writing in one’s underwear.

EzineArticles is a privately owned business, that should have the right to set whatever rules and regulations it’s owners believe to be appropriate to the ongoing success of the venture. If you as an author disagree with them, you should stand up for your rights, and show us all, by removing your articles from EzineArticles. After all, no one has a gun to your head, forcing you to publish on EzineArticles.

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Lance Winslow writes:

Actually I really do not care so much about this issue. I was just using this dialogue to write some articles and was running low on content for the week. Through this Blog post I wrote 16 articles on the subject and thank everyone for their help in diving into all the aspects of this issue with me. The research is useful for the 16 articles I wrote on the subject. Here is what I really think of the issue after playing the Devil’s Advocate against the rule;

I truly believe that if authors are purposefully gaming the search engines and miss spelling words in their titles to use trickery for ‚¬“Click Thrus‚¬ that it should not be allowed. I believe we should refrain from setting up a artificial intelligent ‚¬“bot‚¬ or program to spell check, because of Industry Buzz Words and Create-a-Word techniques to gather a readers interest. I do in fact believe that purposefully miss spelled titles make the site look very unprofessional and is a detractor.

So then those are my thoughts and I enjoyed the thought process of it all and attacking the issue from all sides to get to the bottom of all the issues involved. Thanks everyone for helping me use ‚¬“Blog‚¬ content to write articles and develop content. My point of the day is to recommend this technique to further your article content.

You see, by participating in Blog discussions and Internet Forums, you can use this to help you formulate ideas for your next article or series of articles, in this case I turned them into 16 articles and perhaps could do some more to round it out at 20 or so. Blog and Forums are excellent places and ways to develop content and the more controversial the subject the better for your articles.

If your industry or next subject has Internet Forums or Blogs discussing an issue then be sure to check them out periodically, especially if you find yourself running out of content, subject matter or a new perspective to write on. Consider this in 2006.

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Pamela Beers writes:

Ed Weiss, your website is beautiful. As a lover of music, I really appreciate the ethereal quality of your site. It is very peaceful to peruse. Poor Lance needs to take a pill and chill…perhaps a gander into your website will give him some peace of mind.

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Pamela Beers writes:

Hm-m-m, Lance, you’ve given me some great fodder for a humor column.

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Frann Leach writes:

Fascinating.

What I find most interesting is the number of proponents of correct spelling who don’t seem to be able to spell. But I agree that Lance might do well to take a chill pill. Mind you, how would he keep up his production levels if he did?

There is one point about mis-spelling that everyone seems to have missed, though: not everyone uses American spellings. As far as I am concerned, 95% of articles are “mis-spelt,” because I am British.

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Trivia: The EzineArticles spell checker originally came from the UK so it was pre-loaded with Queens’ English… we had to add the American English versions of words.

Frann, one good point you are bringing up… That we each write for the audience that we want to attract. If I wanted to attract a UK audience, I’d use the UK spelling of words…so when you say 95% are mis-spelled, what you are really saying, is that the articles were not targeted to your version of English.

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Matthew C. Keegan writes:

The one big negative about spelling something incorrectly is this: it casts doubt with the reader that you are a serious writer. If you can’t carefully write, proofread, and edit your work, then readers will dismiss you as a less than credible source.

http://www.thearticlewriter.com/blog

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