I can only tell you my experience as a British writer.

When I first started writing newsletters, I naturally used British English. It didn’t occur to me to do otherwise back then.

But I was soon shaken out of my ignorance.

Americans, it seems, are very conscious of spelling and are very quick to try to correct you if they think you’ve got it wrong. Morever, they are not particularly conscious of other countries language variations.

In addition, back when I started out, about 80% of my audience was from the U.S.

It came as quite a shock to me that every time I sent out my ezine, I’d get a barrage of complaints – “Don’t you KNOW that there is no ‘u’ in color?”, “Where did you go to school – your spelling is atrocious!”, and one of my favourites from back then from a subscriber who was explaining to me why she had unsubscribed: “I just can’t be bothered to read what you are trying to say when it is constantly filled with distracting basic spelling errors.”

I’m told by my American friends that spelling is a big part of the national psyche – with ‘spelling-bee’ competitions being very popular (and highly competitive!) and so Americans are predisposed towards an awareness of what they see as sloppy writing.

Out of a desire to protect my inbox from the regular onslaught, I started to Americanize my spelling – dropping the ‘u’s', substituting ‘z’ for ‘s’ and using one ‘l’ when two looks so much better (in traveler, for example).

What happened surprised me.

The complaints from Americans stopped overnight.

One or two still wrote about my use of idiom that they were not familiar with, but that, it seems, is a more forgivable offense.

But the expected transfer to complaints from British, Australian and Canadian readers (who all tend to use what is quaintly called ‘International English’ in America) never came.

In over #900 issues of Kickstart I’ve had maybe 6 complaints from British readers about American spellings, whereas I would previously have got (gotten) far more than that for each issue!

My take on it is that we (and I’m lumping all non-American English speakers together here) are so used to seeing American English on the Internet and increasingly in print that we have become used to the differences. While they still seem wrong to us, we are aware that they exist and we don’t see them as ‘mistakes’. In many cases they have become invisible.

So to answer your question, if a significant part of your audience is American – as is most likely the case for many Internet marketers – use American spellings wherever you can – it is too big an audience to alienate.

Becoming bilingual is quite easy and becomes second nature after a while.

Martin

I have a question which may seem small but I keep coming back to it.

I am told by a lot of, presumably, experts that I shouldn’t write boring copy (including email follow ups) but should let my ‘personality’ come through. However I must not alienate my potential audience.

Well, the majority of my potential audience is American. I am British, so, it seems to me natural to spell in British English.

So, what do you think? Will writing in British English be more of a turn off than a turn on?

I have been a fan of your newsletter for many months and I enjoy relating to your little snapshots of life
in England – I grew up in Brussels, Belgium and had a
British mother – maybe that’s why… Belgium isn’t
Britain but it is basically more like Britain that it is to America… I think…

Thank you for all the great information you are presenting on this blog – you do make things easy to
understand.

I have a request for information about
uploading photos to WP-2.5 posts or sidebar – I went to
Documentation for info but didn’t find it very clear and my past experience with blogging has been with Blogger where uploading photos is very simple.

Bye for now,

Fran