Recent Posts
Alternative remedies – simple words for clearer business writing
It really does grate on me when I read letters, adverts, leaflets, or whatever, that sound like the written equivalent of a telephone voice. You know what I mean – when someone suddenly adopts a style they wouldn’t normally use. I think they do it to appear intelligent. However, it makes them sound dull and stilted. It also makes the copy pretty unpleasant and uninviting.
This is going to be a regular post (every two months). I’ll feature two words that are common culprits each post and give you some alternatives. Together we can rid business writing of these stodgy intruders!
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End apostrophe abuse
There I was tucking into my porridge, when a leaflet from my local leisure centre dropped through the door.
I like having something to read with my breakfast so I started to flick through it. There was a rather large ad on the back page (so a good, prominent position that most likely cost quite a bit) and the heading read:
“Wedding Video’s.”
Oh dear. Not a good start. Misplaced apostrophes are my bugbear and for the life of me, I don’t understand why anyone thinks it’s correct to use one in a plural. Reading further down the ad, I came across:
“Children’s Party’s”.
Breakfast now totally ruined, and indigestion setting in, I decided to write about apostrophe abuse again.
An ‘infestation’ of ‘inverted commas’
“Anything that causes you to over-react or under-react can control you, and often does,” reads the quote in the book I’m reading. It’s a book about improving productivity and the quote is absolutely correct. However, it was more relevant at the moment I read it than the author could possibly have imagined.
I found myself very much over-reacting to his over-use of quote marks. He’s wrapped them around anything and everything. On one page alone there are nine instances of totally unnecessary inverted commas. And the very fact I’ve bothered to count them shows I’m over-reacting, and that these seemingly innocuous little punctuation marks are indeed controlling me.
I find them distracting. They force me to pause and emphasise the framed word in a particular way and with a very particular voice in my head that I heartily dislike. So that (and counting the marks) means my productivity is slowed right down: the total opposite of the book’s point.
So when and where should quotation marks be used?
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It’s just so ironic
Let’s start with a little sing-song. All together now…
“It’s like rain on your wedding day
It’s a free ride when you’ve already paid
It’s the good advice that you just didn’t take
And isn’t it ironic … don’t you think?”
Well, no actually I don’t. Bad luck – yes. Ironic – no. So when should you use the word ironic?
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Separated by a common language, guest post by Roy Jacobsen
The first time I ended up on Elaine’s blog, I found myself giggling about her article “A few little words – why straplines matter.” I knew immediately from the context what she was talking about, but for this American reader, straplines are what show up on a woman’s sun-tanned shoulders. So straplines matter here, as well; just not for the same reasons.
England and America are indeed “separated by a common language.”
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