Photo courtesy of WordPlay at http://hubpages.com/hub/2008-election-clipart-Obama-McCainFor reasons I won’t go into now, I don’t watch TV. If I can’t watch it online, I’m not doing it. So when the President was inaugurated or when he was giving an important speech, I watched it online via streaming video. Tonight I missed Obama’s speech to the Joint Session. And when I went onto C-SPAN, they pulled the video while I was watching it (it is up now). So I opted to download his speech and read it (as an aside, I will continue to do this in the future–it only took 15-20 minutes to read). Anyway, my point is this: the President does not have very good grammar skills. I must have spotted about 10 typos. Now before you start thinking (if you haven’t already), “what does this have to do with online legal marketing,” let me explain. Everything. Due to the demands and expectations of our “get-it-now” culture and the speed of technology, more web content than ever before is now being posted on a daily basis. The Online Publishers Association reports that, in July, the average online user either read or posted content on over 1,000 pages–let’s be conservative and say the average user wrote 300 pages of content. It could be a tweet, a blog, web content. This means we are writing just as much as we ever have but even more people are reading what we have written. The need for proof-reading is at an all-time high. Which brings us to the law: lawyers and law firms are judged by their legal writing skills and, consequently, grammatical mistakes are not well-tolerated. But what I have learned in my business as an internet marketer is that mistakes will happen. All the time. So what I have taught my staff is one of my favorite “Lisa-isms”: “We are not perfect, we all make mistakes. All I ask is that you fix it.” So I was greatly comforted to find that even the President of the United States has problems with grammar. I do too. Despite the fact that I majored in English Literature, most of the grammar I learned was from on-the-job training. So Mr. President, on the behalf of legal online marketers every where, I thank you. P.S. Another favorite “Lisa-ism”: “everything is fixable on the web.” Photo courtesy of WordPlay at http://hubpages.com/hub/2008-election-clipart-Obama-McCain