Beyond You’re vs. Your: A Grammar Cheat Sheet Even The Pros Can Use by Hayley Mullen.
From the post:
Grammar is one of those funny things that sparks a wide range of reactions from different people. While one person couldn’t care less about colons vs. semicolons, another person will have a visceral reaction to a misplaced apostrophe or a “there” where a “their” is needed (if you fall into the latter category, hello and welcome).
I think we can still all agree on one thing: poor grammar and spelling takes away from your message and credibility. In the worst case, a blog post rife with errors will cause you to think twice about how knowledgeable the person who wrote it really is. In lesser cases, a “then” where a “than” should be is just distracting and reflects poorly on your editing skills. Which is a bummer.
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More than the ills mentioned by Hayley, poor writing is hard to understand. Using standards or creating topic maps is hard enough without having to decipher poor writing.
If you already write well, a refresher never hurts. If you don’t write so well, take Hayley’s post to heart and learn from it.
There are errors in standards that tend to occur over and over again. Perhaps I should write a cheat sheet for common standard writing errors. Possible entries: Avoiding Definite Article Abuse, Saying It Once Is Enough, etc.