When You Write, Walk Your Talk

Do you really know what you’re talking about?

There was an article I read on how good web developers should be. Based on the stuff the author wrote and considering that some visitors like myself were not as technology-savvy as he was, he did seem very credible about the subject.

A good web developer, he explained, should know this program, that software, most social media, and so on and so forth. He kept enumerating the must-bes and must-knows. He was an expert, nobody was about to contest that. Until he said that one needs to know English and, to emphasize, followed it up with “Did you born in the USA, UK, …….?” Uh, what? Say that again?

I paused and after a moment of comprehension, laughed. He definitely meant “Were you born…”

Considering how grammatically incorrect many of his statements were, I just knew he wasn’t kidding. It wasn’t for me to laugh at someone’s broken English. I laughed at the irony in what that particular non-native English speaker said. If he didn’t seem credible enough doing the technogab, my faith in him as an expert would have died.

Let that be our lesson. The first rule in writing is to write what you know – all of us writers, I suppose, have been made aware of that.  Evidently, he could use more practice to sharpen his communication skills.  It’s not about the English, really. That was circumstantial. It should have been about knowing his targeted audience, his medium, what to write and how to write about it.

If you want to give the impression that you  are experienced in certain fields, go ahead, share your knowledge. But know when to draw the line. Do not claim to know something you obviously are not good at. The least you can do is to have a field expert check your work before you click on “publish”.

You don’t just talk the talk, know what I mean?