Frequently Asked Questions About the Best Website Design and Marketing for Attorneys, Podiatrists, and Other Professionals

Domain extensions can be helpful in giving consumers basic information about a website, such as .gov for municipal sites and .edu for online homes of schools and universities. However, there is no ranking benefit for using .edu over a .com—and Google won’t be handing out any bonus points for newly-minted domain extensions, either.

You may remember from our previous blog posts on domain extensions that many new domain extensions are becoming available. In addition to .com, .gov, .org, and .edu, we may soon see .app, .radio, .help, and nearly any other extension imaginable. These new extensions are called Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs).

Google has recently confirmed that websites with new gTLDs will be evaluated based on the same geo-targeting settings as other sites, and will not be given any more or less weight when the search engine crawls, indexes, or ranks URLs. In short, using a new gTLD will not give your website any advantage in search results.

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

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Email signatures are meant to show your readers who you are and how to get in contact with you and your business. Although the signature is a crucial aspect of a letter, all too often it is neglected and inserted more as an afterthought than anything else. However, a good signature not only secures the reader’s attention, but also allows you the opportunity to gain more traffic to your site. On the other hand, a poor signature can make you look bad while also costing you a favorable response.

The trick is knowing the difference.

Signature Flair…Without Going Too Loopy

Email signatures should be concise, informative, and unique. Regrettably, many people focus on being unique above all else. The result: a mess of graphics that overwhelms the senses (not to mention the message), or a long-winded novella. Remember, the signature shouldn’t distract from the body of the text...it should enhance it by making the reader want to contact you (not grab a bag of popcorn or snuggle up for a long read).

In order to show professionalism without going overboard, you need to be able to find a balance between personal flair and necessary information. You need to know what your signature should include, and what needs to be dropped before it distracts and alienates business.

Items to Include

• A distinct separation from the body of the text.
• Your name.
• Position: managing partner, M.D., D.P.M., etc.
• Contact information: phone number, email, etc. Don’t go overboard! Your clients don’t need 50 ways to reach you; one or two will suffice and allow them to get in contact with you through your preferred medium.
• Trackable links to your professional website.
• Trackable links to your business’s Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn profile. Remember, less is more—choose one and stick with it.
• Design flair. Make your signature unique by adding your own personal touches to the closing (“Cheers”…“See you soon”…“I’m here for you,” or something similar) or by adding a small image or logo.

Signatures for private and some public organizations may require more information, such as company telephone number, or business address. You should be alert to local regulations.

Items to Drop

• Your resume, skill sets, or life achievements. When your signature is longer than your email, you have a problem. Leave the CV for your bio.
• Home phone number or address, unless your work is your home.
• Personal Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram details. Although it’s nice to share your vacation photos and memes with your friends, clients and other businesses don’t need to follow your personal life.
• URLs other than your business home page.
• Random quotations, jokes, or proverbs. There’s just too much risk of offending clients.
• Animated images.
• Logos that attempt to cram all the signature information into it. Small logos are fine and can showcase your personality, but a single image that replaces your signature isn’t wise.

Well Done!	Umm…Not So Much
Gretchen Upright Foster Project Manager Director 703-665-0307 Site Awesomization Facebook | Blog	Gretchen Upright Director of Everything Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Upright I’m Completely Awesome Hi, Mom! 10555 Main St., Suite 470A Fairfax, VA 22030 703-665-0307, 703-997-1309, 866-460-3724 https://www.fosterwebmarketing.com …and about ten more lines of text!

 

The next time you’re writing an email, before you click SEND, remember to check your signature lines to make sure they’re exactly what you want them to be. Otherwise, you could jeopardize the entire point of the letter.

For more information on correspondence and content formatting, feel free to browse our highly informative (and often uniquely chuckle-worthy) blogs.

Are You A Lawyer Or podiatrist Who Needs To Get More Clients?

If you've been trying to get more leads, more clients or patients, and you're not sure how to get there, Foster Web Marketing is here to help. Contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

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Most medical professionals who develop websites want content that attracts the perfect patient and presents their practices in a positive light. They want content that sounds professional, yet personable, and they want their staff to appear knowledgeable and skilled. Writing in a way that accomplishes those goals can be challenging and requires language that “hooks” a potential patient and keeps him reading about your professional intelligence and expertise. 

Because people come to your website seeking information, you want to provide content that offers that information in a clear and understandable way. If potential patients are confused by your content, they may be less inclined to contact you for an appointment. Writing in a way that builds trust and showcases your experience can help attract the patients you want most.

Content That Attracts Potential Patients to Your Website and Keeps Them Reading

Here are some important points to help you provide content that attracts potential patients to your website and keeps them on the page long enough to read your material:

Remember that the attention span of the average person is eight seconds.

Like most people, web users want to find information quickly, so you want your content to get to the point. Put the most critical information up front, and leave the details for later.

Make it personal.

Tailor your message to your perfect patients. For example, if you’re targeting people with diabetes, be sure your headline and subheads pose a question or address an issue that diabetics may be dealing with.

Use the ‘less is more’ rule.

When people search for information about a medical condition, they don’t need a lot of content—they just want the ‘right’ content. Avoid presenting an overload of generic medical content or a ‘wall of text’ that makes it a challenge to read through. Use short, focused pieces of text that present your information in small, readable chunks.

Use bullet lists.

Help your website visitor stay on your page by giving information in quick, brief statements that capture a specific point in a clear, succinct way.

Use headlines to your advantage.

Speak to your desired patient. Pose a hypothetical question or address common issues. Use your headlines and subheadings to capture the readers’ attention by letting them quickly know, “What’s In It For Me?”

What Not to Do

You can also keep a potential patient on your website and interested in your content by avoiding certain techniques, including:

Being clever or anecdotal.

Telling long stories, being cute or clever, or providing unrelated information are sure ways to lose your website visitor.

Using jargon and complicated medical terms.

You want to educate your website visitors, but be sure you’re not talking over their heads. Write to potential patients the way you would speak to them in your office if they were your patient. 

Using too much background information.

Stay away from text that gives broad background information or long narratives that bury the point or never get to it.

Writing for Your Perfect Patient

Some medical professionals want to attract a generic set of patients, but most want to attract their perfect patient. Ideally, your website should speak to those people directly. The words you choose and the approach you take in presenting yourself and your practice are critical in keeping potential patients at your website and turning them into actual patients.

Are You A Lawyer Or podiatrist Who Wants To Learn How Solid Content Can Earn You More Clients?

If you are seeking a trusted, authoriative partner to help you write content that not only attracts but actually converts into clients, Foster Web Marketing is here to help. Contact us online or call our office directly at 888.866.0939 to schedule your free consultation. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.  

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Not really. This tactic was adopted in the early days of social media as a fast way to make a new enterprise look more established. Unfortunately, many firms are still buying into this ineffective advertising trick, suffering the loss of their marketing capital and no real gain.

Buying Fake "Likes" on Facebook Won't Get You Real Clients

Before you pay to add followers to your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or YouTube pages, you should be aware that these followers are:

• Not real people. There are companies that exist solely to create false online identities—complete with email addresses, social media accounts, and even phone numbers—that are then sold to digital middlemen, which are commonly called “click farms.” These identities are then sold by the bundle to unsuspecting companies looking to pad their online audiences. Put simply, your 1,000 new followers are no different than the spambots that plague an unprotected comments section.
• Unable to engage. Although your new followers are not real people, some can be used to go beyond a one-time interaction—liking a new post or even commenting on a thread. However, these robots can only talk, not listen, making any engagement they do with your website generic and irrelevant. You have paid to perform to an audience of imaginary friends (who will never hire you) instead of finding a local, interested audience.
• Throwing off your marketing numbers. Buying social media followers can turn your marketing data upside-down. From location (many “click farms” are based overseas) to age and income, you will no longer be able to trust any of the demographics collected by your social media accounts, making your real customers lost in the crowd.

These “click farms” stay in business for much the same reason people who sell fraudulent diet pills do—because desperate people can be conned into taking the easy way out. A few thousand “likes” on your Facebook may boost your self-esteem, but if nobody knows who these people are, they’re not likely to trust your business any more than if you had three followers who are actual human beings.

What Else Can I Do to Get People Interested in My Business?

There are nearly limitless ways to interact with your flesh-and-blood followers on social media—and best of all, most of them won’t cost anything. Simple actions such as “liking” other neighborhood business pages, responding to inquiries and comments on your posts in a timely manner, and posting information to entertain and inform your audience are great ways to engage with your target audience: actual people.

When it comes to social media, quality will always trump quantity. To find out how to interact with your audience in an effective and organic way, contact us today at 866-460-3724 to discuss ideas for a robust social media strategy.

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Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Getting Leads From Your Social Media Marketing Efforts?

Not convinced your current social media marketing is converting leads into clients? No worries! Foster Web Marketing can help. Please contact us online or call our office directly at 888.866.0939 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

Some people love to hate Google because of all its updates, changes, and rules. We acknowledge that this can be frustrating, but we also know how valuable the search tool is! And, every now and then, Google gives us a gift that doesn’t require a mad dash to fix our backlink profiles or clean up our over-stuffed content.

This time, we’re excited to receive Google’s gift called “Universal Analytics!” You should be excited, too.

Whether you have your own personal Google Analytics account set up for your website, or you use the information that Foster Web Marketing supplies (or both—bravo!), you should know that Google Analytics is upgrading to “Universal Analytics.”

Universal Analytics Offers a Wide Range of Improved Tracking:

• Better mobile tracking
• The ability to track user IDs across all devices
• Demographic information
• “Lighter weight” for your website (performs in a less resource-intensive way so as to not slow down user experience)
• Better marketing integration
• Better forward compatibility

It’s important to note that if you’re a client of Foster Web Marketing, you automatically have a Google Analytics account set up for your website, and therefore your account has been already upgraded to Universal Analytics.

And even if you're not a client, Google has automatically upgraded most accounts, so chances are you don’t need to worry about doing it yourself.

How To Confirm Whether Your Site Is Making Use of Universal Analytics

However, we operate by the philosophy “trust but verify,” so if you want to verify that your account is good to go, just follow these steps:

• Login to your personal Google Analytics account.
• Go to your Admin page.
• If you see “Tracking Info” under the “Property” column (the middle column), that means your account is already upgraded. You’re done!
• If you don’t see “Tracking Info” and instead see “Tracking Code,” then your account has not been upgraded. There should be an option in that same middle “Property” column that says “Universal Analytics Upgrade.” Click this and follow the steps.

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

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Reviews have become increasingly important for all businesses. If you want to do well, you have to have a good review reputation online. Unfortunately for attorneys, podiatrists, and other physicians, these reviews are hard to get. That’s why so many of our clients ask us questions about how to make sure that the reviews they get stick—that they aren’t filtered out by the big review sites (Google, Yelp, FindLaw, HealthGrades, etc.).

To answer your question, and to help you ensure that you’re following best practice review-gathering strategies, we’ve compiled a list of the questions clients ask most often along with our best, most ethical advice:

Can I have people leave reviews from my office?

Yes and no. The one big no-no here is setting up a computer in your office for reviews. Review sites are onto this and can tell if reviews are all coming from the same IP address. If they see it happening they will yank all these reviews.

However, it is acceptable to have them leave a review from their phone, so don’t be afraid to encourage pleased patients, clients, or customers to submit a review before they leave your office. For more on how to ask for reviews, read our article on exactly how to ask for reviews.

Can I offer a discount or gift for a review?

No. Never offer an incentive for people who leave a positive review. This is strictly forbidden. Some people have tried to get around it by giving the gift and saying it’s for any review, positive or negative, but we don’t recommend doing so. Just get reviews the old fashioned way: earn their praise and then ask them to share the love.

Can I send people to review sites from my website?

You can send people directly to most review websites and not have any issues. Here is an example of our “Rate Us!” page:

Keep the content on these pages short and sweet. Don’t distract visitors with a ton of modules or other info; you want to point their eyes directly to the review site buttons, leading them down a clearly marked path to review success!

It is important to note that while we normally don’t see reviews cleared out when a review site is accessed from a website, there is one notable exception: Yelp. To avoid this, only send users to Yelp thorough a button on your website that uses a Google search link. This way Yelp won’t see you send people to their site, but the link will still offer direct access to your page on the review site.

To do this, type in “Your Business Name site:www.Yelp.com,” using your actual business or practice name at the start. Here is an example:

To get this link for your site, right click on your business name for Yelp, select, “Copy link address,” and then embed this link into the Yelp button on your website. This link will be long, and should look something like this:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDQQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yelp.com%2Fbiz%2Ffoster-web-marketing-fairfax&ei=OmnjVI7cCYuwogTEr4LwCg&usg=AFQjCNGsVyE3EVd5VgV6wEVKFPRiEFJKqQ&sig2=vQwkZkEhQTNmKLEP7lFN9w

One word of caution: Make sure you choose the right link, the right business, when you look at your search results. That may seem like a no-brainer but it can be tricky, especially given how many similar brand names there are, particularly in the podiatry field.

Should I pay someone to get reviews for me?

If someone offers to dramatically increase the number of good reviews you get, run away! The only people who offer instant positive reviews are cheating cheaters who cheat, and any reviews you get will be fictitious and almost guaranteed to get your reviews, both real and fake, yanked from review sites. Goodbye hard-earned, legitimate reviews!

Now, if you have a law firm marketing company helping you run an ethical review acquisition campaign, that’s a different story. There is a lot of leg work involved in getting good reviews and managing your online reputation, so there is no problem if you hire this work out. Just never hire someone who promises are too good to be true.

Can I transfer testimonials or written reviews to review sites?

No. If you’re sent a kind, glowing email, or someone responds positively on a comment card in your office you absolutely cannot transfer these kind words to reviews sites.

What you can do is use this opportunity to ask for a review. When you get a positive email response or comment, either verbally or in writing, ask for a review. Thank them for their kind words and ask if they wouldn’t mind sharing them with other looking for excellent legal or medical care, pointing them to your “Rate Us” page.

Should I ask friends, family, and my employees to write reviews?

No. While it can be tempting to send out an office-wide memo to ask employees to write a positive review, or to broach the subject with your family over Thanksgiving dinner, don’t. Not only could this get reviews yanked (if they all come from your office, for example), it’s just bad business. It’s disingenuous, it’s cheating, and it can create a bad feeling among your staff; nobody wants to feel forced into this kind of thing. So save your relationships, and your reviews, and work on getting legitimate reviews using advice from our Reviews Matter webinar.

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

The road to success is littered with the broken remains of companies that couldn’t finish the trip. When you pick through the rubble of their websites, you’ll see horrible misspellings, tortured word choices, and grammar that doesn’t belong in any English sentence. It’s obvious that most of this wretched website wreckage wasn’t made in the United States, and that the webmasters tried nefarious SEO techniques to attract customers.

So much effort wasted to so little effect. Makes you sad, doesn’t it?

Even if we gave you names of some of the companies, medical practices, and law firms that failed, that’s not the sort of evidence you want, is it? Anecdotes are fine for stories told around the campfire, but proof comes in the form of scientific results that anyone can reproduce. The question is, do we have the evidence you want, or not?

Yeah, we’ve got it. Pull up a campstool, Bucky. This will take a little bit of time.

A Proof by Counterexample

Bad grammar and incomprehensible spelling usually don’t draw a big fan club. Frankly, it’s not believable that website readers have been sending feedback to complain, “Oh, man, this site is far too informative, helpful, and clearly written! We demand more incomprehensible bilge, like we get from your competitors!” Our experience has been that when a business owner starts complaining about the burdens of good word usage, that’s a sign that some other game is being played.

You can bet that “other game” is about money.

Now, we know that good grammar and interesting, informative content really doesn’t cost any more than weak and incoherent gibberish. Your staff members can learn to write fantastic content as part of their regular job duties. But money can become part of the equation when an unethical web marketer tries to sell a bargain package to a naive business owner. The long-term result is always unfortunate for the business.

So if you’re really asking for our permission to neglect all ethical considerations and try to fool Google into giving you a leading placement in search engine results, we have one answer: it’s your business. We don’t get a vote, and you don’t need our permission. If you manage to prosper over the next year or two, please come back and tell us about it; you definitely will have beaten the odds.

Do you really feel like wagering the future of your business on one roll of the dice? If so, we wish you good luck.

Globo Lingo Captures Evidence From the Field

But we promised you hard data, and we haven’t forgotten that promise.

Hard data’s not so easy to come by, as you’ve probably realized. We can’t do double-blind testing because we can’t set up two identical law firms or podiatry clinics or some other company, create two complementary websites, and test whether good grammar attracts and retains more business. We can’t even create two websites—one grammatical, one not—for one company, because the existence of the “bad” site will potentially skew search engine results and contaminate the data.

But about a year ago, one company, Globo Lingo, figured out a way to extract some valid statistics in a real-world social experiment. Although news links change over time, you still may be able to find contemporary news reports of the experiment. Globo Lingo’s researchers found that 59 percent of its participants would be less likely to use a service or product if there were obvious grammatical or spelling mistakes on its website or marketing materials.

Fifty-nine percent. Much more than half. If this were an election, they’d be calling it a landslide.

Now, the study wasn’t perfect. The sample size was fairly small (just over a thousand people). Globo Lingo is a translation service based in the United Kingdom, so perhaps its results don’t translate perfectly to U.S.-based business websites. But we probably can trust the overall direction of the results—the qualitative data—because they align so well with what we’d expect based on reasoning and the real-world anecdotes in case after case.

Don’t Buy Pandora’s Box

If someone is trying to sell you on a marketing system based on promises that grammar, spelling, and even content itself doesn’t matter, think again. Remind him that anecdotes don’t count. Demand to see his hard evidence and statistics before you pick up that black hat.

High-quality content writing is easier than it looks, and a bargain at almost any price. Why? Because your website content is at the heart of your marketing strategy. You’ve heard us say it time and again: Content is king, and there are no signs of an abdication any time in the near future.

Are You A Lawyer Or podiatrist Who Wants To Learn How Solid Content Can Earn You More Clients?

If you are seeking a trusted, authoritative partner to help you write content that not only attracts but actually converts into clients, Foster Web Marketing is here to help. Contact us online or call our office directly at 888.886.0939 to schedule your free consultation. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach but exceed your goals.

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This excellent question was posed by one of our clients. The physician had legally changed her name, but didn’t know the best way to proceed when it came to changing it online. On one hand, she was ready to be done with her old name, but she didn’t want this change to affect her visibility online.

She was right to be concerned! There is a very good chance that patients who haven’t seen her in a while, or prospective patients who have been referred from a friend, will search using the old name.

Three Steps to Name Change Success

Whether it was a divorce, marriage, or entrance into the witness protection program, it’s important that you change your name not only on your website but also on external directories and profiles like healthgrades.com or avvo.com. I’m not going to sugarcoat it: this is going to be a tall task, but it’s a necessary step. To help you through this process I will outline exactly how to go about finding where your name is listed on the Internet, and then give advice on how best to make the changes needed.

Please note: As the client who asked the question was a podiatrist I am going to use a physician in the examples below. However, any professional or business owner who relies on her name for brand recognition needs to attend to each of the steps listed.

Your Website Makes the Transition

This will be the simplest step in the process. We recommend that you find all mentions of your old name on your website and change them to your new name. The only exception to this rule will be on your bio page and perhaps your homepage. Mentioning your former name on these pages will prevent prospective clients from thinking, “Oh, I’ve got the wrong person!” On these pages, your new name should be prominently displayed, but under that, you should add something to the effect of, “Dr. New Name, formerly known as Dr. Former Name.” You can even wield a bit of wit here, saying something like, “New name, same excellent medical care.”

Audit Your Local Listings

Ideally, you’ve already performed a local listings audit and have an extensive, well-organized list of everywhere your business is listed. If so, please move on to step three. If not, it’s a good idea to do this now. Start by searching for your name and your profession on Google. You will use the search string equivalent to “former name podiatrist”; for instance, “Rachel Elkins podiatrist.” You may wish to make repeated searches using synonyms: “podiatrist Rachel Elkins,” “Rachel Elkins foot podiatrist,” and so forth. Make a list of every website that pops up in your search results.

Add to this list every website you know you’re listed on. This should include Facebook, LinkedIn, and any listings or social media sites that you’ve already claimed (Healthgrades, Avvo, etc.). Another good idea is to use the free services at Yext. Yext will show you exactly where you’re listed, Internet-wide. Add any sites that Yext finds to your list. You should now have a very thorough list (we suggest using a spreadsheet to organize this list) of the places your name is listed online. With this list in hand, move on to step three.

Change Your Information

It’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty of this process. Starting with the results that popped up in the search of your name, begin visiting the websites and editing your name. This will be a tedious task, as it’s possible you’ve never claimed the majority of your listings and will therefore have to register on with website before being able to make changes. But don’t let this deter you! It’s a crucial step that you simply cannot skip! Go down the list, one by one, making notes in your spreadsheet when you successfully make changes. As you do so, feel free to add your new name disclaimer in the description box that most of these websites provide. “Dr. New Name, formerly known as Dr. Former Name; new name, same excellent medical care.”

Pro tip: Make the most of your time by ensuring that your name, address, and phone number are identical on each site. Even a “&” on one site an “and” on another, a listing of “Stephanie” on one website and “Steph” on another will wreak havoc on the success of your local listings. So scrutinize each of your listings, correcting these mistakes as you go.

| Search Engine Optimization For Law Firms And Medical Practices

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In America, we have a proud and defiant tradition of resisting authority. It’s not at all obvious that you should obey the instructions of some “cranky grammarian” just because he has a regular forum for his views.

In fact, this question—“Who gets to decide about grammar?”—has been the center of the target in a long-standing dispute about language: the conflict between prescriptivism and descriptivism. This struggle is mostly waged in academic halls, but now and then, it engages public attention, often when dictionaries issue new editions.

• Descriptivists argue that dictionaries and grammar guides should collect the way the people actually use words, without making judgments about correctness. In their view, it’s perfectly okay—valuable, even—for a dictionary to include the word ain’t, or to add the latest popular Internet slang, or to say that one meaning of the word literally is “figuratively or metaphorically,” because those are all examples of how English is truly used. In summary: English is a living language that constantly changes, and we must adapt to today’s words, meanings, and grammar.
• Prescriptivists believe that dictionaries and other reference works have an obligation to mark the acknowledged boundaries of English by pointing out when usage isn’t considered standard. Sure, prescriptivists say, languages change over time, but if something is not yet fully accepted as conventional English, it’s important to tell potential users that a word may be obsolete; limited to a region, dialect, or subculture; slang; or roundly rejected by a panel of usage experts.

Steps Beyond the Dictionary

Every dictionary will express its editor’s viewpoint on the prescriptivism vs. descriptivism debate. But English is more than the static word lists trapped in dictionaries. For grammar and usage, the equivalent references are the stylebooks maintained by various publishing organizations. Many newspapers, for instance, follow the rules of the Associated Press Stylebook. The University of Chicago publishes the Chicago Manual of Style, which is widely used in the book publishing industry. Many academic papers follow the rules established by the Modern Language Association (MLA). I’ve always been partial to the U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual.

You know what? Each of these sets of rules flatly contradicts all the others at one point or another. And yet the editors of each stylebook can cite a long list of historical examples to show that esteemed authors preferred the usage rules this book favors. We have a case of many emperors issuing contradictory laws: the result is anarchy.

Does the English Language Exist?

So, what does it mean when the very best experts we can find can’t agree on how words should be defined and used? I think that we can draw three important conclusions:

There’s no such thing as definitive English.

No one individual—nope, not even a grumpy content editor for the best U.S. web marketing company—has the exclusive right to determine what is or is not good grammar and usage.

Nevertheless, chaos does not rule.

Most people who have made a serious study of English will agree on the rules of grammar most of the time. You can make an analogy with a map of a partially explored land. Some of the borderlands may be fuzzy, but there really is a discrete English language that is our common heritage.

In the end, English belongs to its users.

If you’re a writer with a special fondness for run-on sentences, then you’re free to use them and to garner support from other writers. Perhaps you’ll be so persuasive that run-ons will become conventional English usage a generation from now. Perhaps you’ll be dismissed as a crackpot. But it’s your language, your freedom of expression, and your opportunity to try to rewrite the rules.

Ultimately, then, those are my credentials too. I’m a writer, a lover of English, and someone who has taken the time to study grammar and usage enough to be able to teach others. I will necessarily be taking stands on issues that do not have universal agreement. Readers who disagree are welcome to respond by adding comments to blog postings, clicking on my contact information, or by reaching out to the Foster Web Marketing content team by phone or email. We always welcome the vigorous and lively exchange of viewpoints.

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