When I was still living with my parents, my dad always used to tut loudly at the television whenever a certain celebrity hairdresser happened to pop up on afternoon lifestyle shows or mid-morning light entertainment programmes, whilst he watched with disdain from his armchair.

“Why would you trust this fool* to do your hair? Have you seen what’s died on his head?!”

Remembering those times he reacted this way always makes me giggle, but my dad had a fair line of questioning.  Really, why would you trust and invest money into somebody who didn’t present themselves to the same high standards they profess to achieve for the people they sell to?

Thinking of it in terms of how I do business, I would never, for example, trust a social media specialist with no / limited / unprofessional social media presence.

Similarly, I would never trust a web designer with an unresponsive or just plain ugly website.

Likewise, then, I urge anybody reading this post never to trust a copywriter who can’t spell / punctuate / string a coherent sentence together.

There’s a frightening amount of them out there.

On social media platforms such as LinkedIn, I am connected with some absolutely cracking copywriters.  There is so much talent out there in the world of writing, and I love being associated with each and every one of those people.  Obviously, to an extent, we’re all competing for clients, but we all have our niches and we all have the confidence in our professional abilities to know that we can give each and every pitch our best competitive shot.

However, I often get connection requests and contact from people who market themselves as copywriters who – and I have to use dad-type language here – cannot write for shit.  As well as having a shocking grasp of what it means to put together an accurate, coherent and purposeful series of statements, these are the people who are purely getting in touch to ask me how to find clients, push me for useful contacts, and plead me to send partnership work their way.  It’s quite possibly rude of me, but I don’t even bother replying to those messages, because it’s a waste of my time when the person in question couldn’t even be bothered to do justice to our supposedly shared profession.

I’m the kind of person who, if I make a mistake in a text to a friend or in an email to a client, will immediately and apologetically work to rectify said mistake, before then going on to fret about it for the next four hours or until I forgive myself for the linguistic atrocities I have committed in a public domain.  Mistakes do happen, though; I’m human, and it’s a simple proofreading issue.  It’s a different story, however, when a so-called writer’s whole correspondence – and indeed marketing material – is consistently riddled with errors and a lack of care that demonstrates very little grasp of what it means to be a professional writer.

The same goes for organisations who really should know better, such as schools, colleges and universities.  It’s frightening what you see get published or shared in the world of education… would you trust them to educate you, really?

My point is this: If you feel you may need to invest in the services of a copywriter to present your project, business or organisation in the most professional and engaging way possible, you don’t have to pick me, but please do make sure that you don’t pick somebody who has made a state of their own writing even before they get their clumsy hands on yours.

*He didn’t use that exact word as such…