Give your company a voice
This meme is humorous but it makes a serious point. As a copywriter, I believe punctuation is always important, whether in a formal business communication or on social media. Southern Rail is just one company that appears to overlook the importance of the comma, as demonstrated by this inadvertently frank exchange with a Twitter user, picked up by Private Eye:
Customer: Are you putting on replacement shuttles for the Rye service you’ve cancelled again?
Standing out from the crowd is vital to business success. Yet very few businesses are in the enviable position of providing such a unique product or service that they have no competitors. Most of us must compete with others in our field who provide a very similar offering, differentiated only by price, features, location or quality of service, if that. So what makes your product or service stand out?
As a marketer, it’s easy to make lots of noise and generate press coverage for a genuinely unique product or service that is bursting with innovative features and unparalleled customer benefits.
The semicolon is perhaps the most underused of punctuation marks and this may be due largely to confusion over its purpose and correct use. The simplest way of describing what a semicolon does is to signify a long pause. How long? The best answer I can give is somewhere between a comma and a full stop.
There are no precise guidelines and that is possibly one of the reasons behind them falling into disuse.
Google has created a fascinating graphic of America’s top misspellings by analysing what people in each state type into its search engine. In Louisiana and Oregon, for instance, most people are unable to spell ‘definitely’, while in California they struggle with ‘desert’. In New York and Colorado people have difficulties spelling ‘beautiful’, in Florida ‘tomorrow’ proves problematic and in Washington, North Carolina and Missouri ‘pneumonia’ is most commonly misspelt. Pity the poor population of Massachusetts though – their most troublesome spelling is the name of their own state!
We happily refer to anything more than one foot as ‘feet’ and accept that the plural of goose is ‘geese’, so why isn’t the plural of moose ‘meese’? (Or mooses for that matter).
The simple answer is that it’s what’s known as a loanword – a word adopted from a foreign language with little or no modification. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word moose has its origins in the Native American Algonquian language.
It’s complicated
Just like in real life, in the English language there are some words destined to go through life alone, some that that work best in an uncommitted, friends-with-benefits arrangement and others that thrive as part of a steady, committed relationship. If you haven’t already guessed, in this week’s grammar tutorial I’m talking about compounds – pairs of words that are often, but not always, seen together.
The vast majority of compound words consist of either a headword (key word) and a prefix such as ex-husband,
A new study published by the Oregon State and Texas Universities has confirmed what we already know: corporate jargon turns off customers and alienates employees.
Their report published in the journal Organisational Dynamics recommends that businesses should swap business gobbledygook for genuine human warmth – in other words, write from the heart as one human being to another. So instead of aiming to “deliver robust solutions to empower communities” the report suggests managers should follow the example of Toys ‘R’ Us,
Spelling is notoriously tricky in the English language. If you occasionally confuse their, they’re and there, phase and faze, rest assured you are not alone. The English language contains many words that sound the same but, confusingly, are spelt differently and also mean completely different things. These are known as homophones and other examples are pray and prey and to,
Although Latin is often said to be a dead language it is the foundation of most modern languages today and English is no exception. Many of us use Latin phrases – or their abbreviated forms – every day of our working lives without thinking twice about it. But misuse is commonplace so, with thanks to www.grammarly.com – the brilliant website for grammar nerds like me – here are the meanings of some commonly used (and abused) Latin abbreviations:
Abbreviation
In full
Literal meaning
Everyday use
Eg
Exempli gratia
For the sake of example
For example
Etc
Et cetera
And the rest
And so on/and the rest
ie
Id est
It is/That is
When we want to explain or clarify something – Read more »
There have been so many grammar-related news items recently, it’s been a while since we looked at grammar. So today let’s tackle conjunctions – the everyday words we use to link parts of a sentence together. Here’s an example of the simplest kind of conjunction:
I can help you with writing printed communications and also website copy.
Here, it’s the word ‘and’ that is the conjunction – it is a link and nothing more.
