Common Consistency Mistakes To Avoid While Writing Content
Be it a blog post, a social media copy, a report, a case study, or content for anything else, the essence of what you have written, no matter how good it is, can get diluted if you are not consistent.
Consistency mistakes in writings are very common. But just because it is common doesn’t make it acceptable.
A great piece of writing is characterised by the following:
a. Quality Content: Here, by quality content, I mean the message/information that you want to convey through your writing - it should be correct and must provide what the readers/audience are looking for or would like to read.
b. Flow-less Language: Once you know what exactly you have to say, you have to deliver it in a manner that people read. Even the dullest of message can be made interesting if the language and tone of your writing is good.
c. Correct Grammar: You have the message and you know how you are going to deliver it. Just make sure you present it in grammatically correct sentence. Why would anybody trust you if you can’t even frame a sentence correctly?
d. High Readability: Make sure you present the content in a manner that is readable. Let’s say you have written a piece of quality content for your blog in a grammatically correct and flow-less language. But the sentences and paragraphs are unusually long. Also, there is only text all through the page. Is anybody going to read such a boring and scary piece of content? Are you going to read a blog post like this if you come across one?
All your hard work to create such a beautiful article will go in vain because people won’t even read it to know how good it is. The huge blocks of text have already scared the shit out of them.
It is, therefore, important to write content in a manner that is readable.
One of the important aspects of readable content is consistency.
Most Common Consistency Mistakes In Writings
Consistency mistakes in writing creates a bad impression.
If there are inconsistencies in you writing, let’s say, in your spellings, people are likely to take an uncomfortable pause when they stumble upon one. This makes a bad impression - in this example, the reader would probably think that the writer wasn’t sure about the spelling or may be the writer didn’t care much. Either way, it isn’t good. It is bound to have a negative impact on the authority of the writer.
It is, therefore, important that you avoid making consistency mistakes in your writing. Let us now look into some of the most common consistency mistakes that you need to be careful about while writing:
a. Hyphenation
One of the common consistency errors is seen in the usage of hyphens. Let us consider the word ‘antinational’. Or is it ‘anti-national’?
Whatever it is, do not write anti-national in one place and antinational in the other. If you are using the hyphen in between, use it everywhere.
Some other examples to elaborate this consistency mistakes related to hyphenation are:
- Decision making or Decision-making
- Time table or Time-table
- Problem solving ability or Problem-solving ability.
b. Capitalisation
Let’s say this article has two sub-headings:
- 5 Most Common Consistency Mistakes To Avoid
- How to avoid consistency mistakes?
Do you see it?
In the first one, I have capitalised the first letter of each word, whereas in the second one, only the first letter of the first word is capitalised.
This should be avoided. If you want to capitalise the first letter of every word in a heading, do it for all the headings.
This is also valid for certain words in the paragraphs (not just the headings). For example, do not use ‘Government’ with a capital ‘G’ in one place and ‘government’ with a small ‘g’ in another.
c. Spelling - American Vs British English
This is the most common of all the consistency mistakes that people make. If you are using American English, do not bring in British English in between. Do not write both ‘color’ and ‘colour’ in the same piece of content. Or ‘meter’ and ‘metre’.
Check out this comprehensive list of American and British spelling differences.
Remember, inconsistency in spellings can happen beyond this American English-British English thing, For example, it’s not a good practice to use both ‘Lakkhan’ and ‘Lakshman’ in the same piece of content. By the way, Lakkhan and Lakshman are the two variations of the same Hindu name.
d. Numbers in a Sentence
Read the following two sentences.
There are five consistency mistakes that writers commonly make. One should put conscious effort while writing to avoid making these 5 consistency mistakes.
As you can see, in one place the number is spelled out wherein in the other, it is not.
Don’t do that.
If you use numerals, use it everywhere. If you want to spell it out, spell it out everywhere.
e. Capitalisation & Punctuation In Bullet Points, Lists, Tables
Check out the following list of common consistency errors:
- Hyphenation
- Capitalisation,
- spelling,
- Numbers
Here, the first, second and fourth items start with a capital letter whereas the third item starts with a small letter. Again, the second and third items in this list ends with a comma but there is no punctuation after the first and fourth items.
This should be avoided. If you want to capitalise the first letter, do it for all the items. Likewise, if you want to use a comma after each item, use it for all the items in the list.
Maintain these consistencies for entries in a table as well.
So, these are the most common consistency mistakes that writers and editors make. To avoid making these mistakes, one must put conscious efforts while writing. Also, using tools like grammarly will make it easier to identify some of these consistency mistakes in your writings.
Maintaining a consistency in these particular aspects of your writing will help in remarkable improvement of the reading experience. Hence, it is extremely important that writers and editors should be careful about not making these mistakes.
