Free Custom «Bad Grammar in Advertising» Essay Paper

Many advertisements contain grammatical errors. The errors are knowingly or unknowingly included in the advertisements by designers or editors. Though the errors can be entertaining, they show incompetence and are shameful to organizations (Postcardmania, 2012). Many people may lose trust in organizations whose advertisements contain a lot of grammatical errors.

The slogan “To Each Their Own” is used to advertise Honda Civic cars (Breaking Copy, 2011). It has grammatical errors. The use of singular and plural in the sentence does not agree. It uses a noun “Each”, which is singular, but follows it with an adjective of possession “their”, which is plural. The slogan should have been written as “To Each His Own” or “To Each Her Own”. This expresses both the noun and adjective in their singular form. The grammatical mistake shows the incompetence not only of the editor and the author of the advertisement, but also of the company as a whole. It also shows that the company is not keen on what it presents to the public. My personal opinion is that the company is careless in all its dealings including its products and services. If the company cannot concentrate on simple and small issues such as grammatical mistakes on its adverts, it will probably not be very keen on the products and services it offers. It might provide clients with low quality products and services.

 

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Another advertisement with a spelling mistake was seen on a restaurant during the Valentines’ Day in 2004. The restaurant had posters pinned around the walls with the inscriptions “Now Excepting Reservations For Valentines Day” (Get Cynical, 2004). The spelling mistake is in the word “Excepting” which would have been “Expecting”. An apostrophe should also have been added in between “e” and “s” to make the word “Valentines” possessive. The correct spelling is therefore “Valentine’s”. The whole advert would have been “Now Expecting Reservations for Valentine’s Day”. The advert shows that the restaurant’s management and employees are not keen on issues relating to the restaurant. I personally feel that the restaurant does not take its advertisement keenly and even after pinning it all over the walls, they could not realize the mistakes.

“The pilgrims are worth a lot more then a turkey dinner” advert was seen on a full page of a New York Times news paper (Avocado8, 2006). The advert has the word “then” misspelled. It should have been “than” since the sentence is comparing pilgrims and turkey. The advert would have been written as “The pilgrims are worth a lot more than a turkey dinner”. This shows that the organization does not carefully proofread its adverts before taking them to the media. I personally think that the advert creates a negative attitude in customers as it shows incompetence of the organization’s editors.