Do you lavish the same care on your social media posts as you do on your writing? Because it‘s a quick-response kind of communication, and we tend to write tweets, Facebook posts and blogs in chatty, colloquial English, it‘s easy to find that clumsy everyday phrases and grammatical mistakes have made their way into what you ‘ve published.
Yes, published. Everything you write online is published, and may be seen by readers who will judge you on it before they ‘ve had a chance to look at your creative work. If there are basic mistakes in language usage, people will notice, and assess you and your writing accordingly. If you want to attract readers for your novel, make sure that what you write on social media is up to scratch. Writers are supposed to have basic writing skills, and deploy them, whether it‘s in 140-character tweets or an epic novel. Using proper grammar and punctuation results in clear communication. It‘s that simple. If you want to see how messages can get garbled, have a look (and a laugh) at some of the howlers that have very publicly appeared in marketing copy: http://writ.rs/marketingtypos