Many Dutch people find writing errors very annoying and they mainly see the writing errors of someone else. It is the case that 98 percent of people in business think that they have sufficient command of Dutch spelling. In their opinion, colleagues are doing worse. According to the respondents of blog website Viking, no less than 75 percent can do better of the business emails that people receive. What annoys people then?
Language annoyances
The biggest annoyance: the dt error is the number one priority. Grammatical errors are the most common and unfortunately are not corrected by the spell checker. Strangely enough, most people see when someone else makes a grammatical mistake, but are less aware of the mistakes they make themselves. Even when reading, you often overlook mistakes that you have made yourself, especially when it concerns matching errors.
Another annoyance is the sentence structure, especially when it concerns a sentence that can be used in spoken language, but which you should not use in an e-mail or business document. Distraught and incomplete sentences cause a lot of annoyance to the reader. According to a survey of 325 respondents by blog website Viking, it turned out that 72 percent of readers find language errors evidence of laziness and carelessness.
Other annoyances:
- lack of capital letters
- typing errors
- misuse of the long ij and short egg
- misuse of possessive pronouns
- spelling mistakes in names (especially when it concerns spelling mistakes in the name of the addressee)
Avoid spelling mistakes
To avoid spelling mistakes, the spelling checker is of course used, but when there is any doubt, advice is often sought from Google. About half of the e-mails sent to colleagues are checked for spelling errors. When it concerns an e-mail that is sent to other companies or customers, people are more careful. External e-mail traffic is checked for spelling errors 83 percent of the time.
How do you avoid spelling mistakes?
Always use a spell checker, but this one is not everything. Sometimes a word is changed in a way that was not intended or the spell checker recommends that you merge two words, which changes the meaning of your sentence.
Do you make a lot of DT mistakes? Try replacing the verb with the word to walk. Usually this works. Are there words that you often misspelled? Write them on a list and keep it handy. Don’t forget to read your text over. You will not remove all errors, but typos will usually be noticed.
Do you know Dutch. Both over and over and irritating is not Dutch. It’s over or over, annoy or annoy.
In contrast to English, Dutch is a language that loves combinations written together. Management system, long-distance runner, long-term planning, social psychological, these are all compounds that have to be written together. Spelling mistakes are usually made due to lack of concentration. Working in a noisy environment often doesn’t help.
What does the annoyance say about you?
According to research, introverts are more annoyed by spelling mistakes than extroverts. The introverted reader will also notice this more often, while his extroverted colleague is much more concerned with the content and reads over the mistakes. This is evident from research done in early 2016 by linguistic experts at the University of Michigan (sources 3 and 4).
People who correct others when they make a spelling mistake are not judged so positively. Not only the person who is being improved is annoyed by this, but bystanders also find this annoying. So unless you’re in the classroom, it might be smarter to bite your lips next time before opening your mouth to correct the mistake.
Everyone makes spelling mistakes
Older people often make spelling mistakes because of changes the language has undergone. Just ask different generations to write words like pancake, vacation and dandelion. It remains difficult and so people got stuck in the (short) time that there were alternative spellings such as buro (desk) and present (gift). This spelling is therefore an alternative spelling in the spelling guide with the addition informal.
Young people are more used to alternative spellings. After all, nothing else is used on Whatsapp and messenger but alternative. Think of w8 (wait), idd (indeed), etc. Young people also make mistakes conscious by using expressly spoken language in their messages. No wonder this has consequences. At the end of primary school, 77 percent of the youngsters spell flawlessly, but at the end of secondary school they have unlearned this good behavior. Only 64 percent of high school final exam candidates still spell flawlessly according to research by the Dutch Language Union (2012).