Give your company a voice
A typically hysterical interview with comedian Michael McIntyre on The Jonathan Ross Show prompted me to write this week about tautology – the use of utterly superfluous words. Michael was highlighting, in his own inimitable style, how Americans feel the need to simplify perfectly adequate English words to the extreme. (Watch the clip here!)
To make his point Michael cited examples including sidewalk (pavement), trash can (bin) and his personal favourite,
Nine-year-old Ammarah Mahmood is a girl after my own heart. Given a school project to find examples of apostrophe misuse, she spotted 15 glaring examples of apostrophes in the wrong place during a 15-minute walk round her local market in Keighley, West Yorkshire. Apostrophes are one of the most commonly misunderstood punctuation marks so here’s a quick recap of when and how to use them.
We’ve all smiled at signs such as “Tomatoe’s” and “Crisp’s”.
A simile makes a direct comparison between two very different things – “memory like a sieve”, “sick as a parrot”, “drunk as a skunk”, “good as gold”…I could go on. Often, but not always, they will use the word ‘like’. For instance, “She goes on and on like a stuck record” or “He has a handshake like a wet fish.” Used sparingly,
Metaphors, similes, hyperbole, alliteration and wordplay are all techniques that, used judiciously, can liven up your writing. I’ll tackle each one of them over the coming weeks but let’s start with metaphors.
You’ll be familiar with expressions such as “It’s raining cats and dogs”, “My son is a couch potato”, “The boss is a dragon”, “His teacher planted the seeds of wisdom” and so on.
You’d think by now the message to “keep it simple stupid” (or ‘KISS’) would have finally filtered through to organisations everywhere. But apparently it hasn’t yet reached the BBC, which included this jargon-filled description of a role in its Facilities Management department: “You will form part of a key team covering all aspects of property management in the UK, through creating solutions to any sustainability challenges and ensuring that, through dotted-line management of the contractor network,
An unusually candid speech by former BBC HR director Lucy Adams graphically demonstrates that it’s not only what you say but the way that you say it. The notorious executive, who attracted a storm of criticism in her £320,000 a year role, claimed “talking like lawyers”, among other things, caused BBC bosses to lose the trust of their employees.
At one point an employee in the BBC’s news division told her that her group emails were “crap” and she should “get someone else to write them.” “I was slightly taken aback,” recalls Ms Adams,
Capital letters are among the more important forms of punctuation as they help guide the eyes and mind through your text. Unconvinced? Try reading this:
“gchq is one of the agencies that contributes to the make-up of the joint terrorism analysis centre. jtac provides advice to the uk government and major industries on terrorist threats.”
The short paragraph above, bereft of all capital letters, is still readable, although it takes a little effort,
I’ve talked about sentence lengths before but how long should a paragraph be? The answer, as usual, is that there is no hard and fast rule – some paragraphs consist of a single line, or even word, whereas in other cases they can go on for a page or more!
The Times newspaper, that arbiter of good grammar, advises its journalists, “Rarely should a paragraph be of only one sentence, least of all a short one,
1. Don’t overload your sentences!
If you’re like me, you will need to constantly fight the irresistible urge to pack too much information into a single sentence. According to the Plain English Campaign, the average sentence should ideally be between 15 and 25 words for readability. So instead of cramming too many facts into one extremely long sentence, cut extraneous information and break it into several sentences to improve readability.
2.
Even the most hopeless writers among us – those who ignore almost every punctuation device – will nonetheless speak in sentences. Sentences are used to make statements, to ask questions, to demand action and express feelings – but what exactly are the rules?
It’s reasonable to say a sentence should express a single idea and be complete. (After all, there’s little more annoying than an unfinished
However, with the help of some clever punctuation,
