As the creators of a writing app, we think good grammar is sexy. But are our tastes mainstream? We wanted to find out: do people swipe right more often on profiles with good grammar? Will it help you get lucky? We did the research.
We surveyed thousands of daters and conducted live research on dating apps. This phase of our research primarily looked at heterosexual daters. It turns out that the sexiness of good grammar is more complex than we thought. You'll find more details below, but these three findings jumped out:
Men lie about the importance of grammar
Men SAY they prefer profiles with good grammar but this was proven false on the dating sites where they were 10% more likely to ignore well-written profiles and match with badly written profiles.
Good grammar will massively boost men's chances
Younger women are 311% more likely to choose well-written dating profiles over those profiles with grammar errors.
Americans care more about good grammar than Brits
In our surveys, Americans claimed to place higher importance on good grammar than our British respondents.
The first results include the number of people who reported grammar as important in our surveys. The second results looked at how people responded to good and bad grammar on the dating apps.
We ran a large-scale survey, asking respondents how important grammar was to them when looking at dating profiles. We then cross-checked the impact of grammar on actual dating profiles by running side-by-side experiments (profiles with and without grammatical mistakes, using the same pictures).
The results just didn't add up!
63% of women say grammar is important when considering potential matches. That checked out in our experiment—women matched 59% MORE with profiles containing good grammar vs profiles with grammatical mistakes.
53% of men say that grammar is important, but our research found some discrepancies here. We found that men actually matched 10% LESS with profiles containing good grammar vs profiles with grammatical mistakes.
In our survey of over 12k people, 63% of women reported that they consider grammar important when assessing a dating profile compared to 53% of men.
We created two versions of various dating profiles (one with good grammar and one riddled with errors) and tested them across a range of ages, genders, and locations.
For women, the well-written versions received 10% fewer matches from men than the ones full of mistakes.
How can this be? Do men feel intimidated by good grammar in a potential partner? Or maybe men subconsciously see profiles with good grammar as indicative of potential partners looking for serious relationships versus short-term hookups?
The opposite is true for men. The well-written versions of younger, male profiles received over 300% more matches from women than their poorly written versions.
Perhaps this is because fewer profiles in that age group use good grammar, allowing such profiles to stand out more.
Even in older age groups, men are likely to get a significant (+39%) boost by using good grammar on their profiles.
In the chart below, you will find the percentages of people who said that good grammar was important to them in dating profiles. Across all three age groups, the US reported that grammar was key for them in choosing matches at a higher rate than their UK counterparts.
61% of Americans responded that good grammar was important to them in dating profiles, compared to 58% of their British counterparts.
Older Brits (63%) are similar to older Americans (65%) in their grammar preference, but younger Brits (51%) are a lot more relaxed about it than younger Americans (56%).
UK attitudes to grammar vary a lot by region compared to the US, which is more homogenous in their views around the importance of good grammar. See our chart below to compare the data yourself.
Is your dating game on point? ProWritingAid will help out by flagging dating-profile clichés, as well as spelling and grammar mistakes, so you can be sure your profile stands out from the crowd (for all the right reasons).
Good writing isn't just important for dating profiles; it's important for everything you write. Use ProWritingAid to check your resume, emails, social posts, fiction, assignments, reports, and any other texts where you want to communicate well.
7,504 survey respondents in the USA + 5,003 survey respondents in the UK = 12,507 respondents total, interviewed from 20 May 2022 to 3 June 2022.
916 matches received between 27 May 2022 and 10 June 2022 on 6 dating platforms (SweetRing, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder) : 12 different profiles on each platform, split equally between men and women, bad grammar and good grammar.
Next steps: In this first phase of research, we looked specifically at men interacting with women. In our next phase, we will be expanding our dating pool to see if similar results are found across a more diverse group of LGBTQ+ daters.