You’re responsible for your organization’s newsletter, and the other day, you read a great item in a magazine. It’s perfect for your organization’s audience, so you reprint it in your newsletter. If you didn’t get permission to do so, you’ve just broken the law. “Wait!” you protest. “I put the name of the magazine under … Read more
A well-known consumer marketer emailed what they thought was an irresistible offer. Using my address, they deduced that I must be a St. Louis Cardinals fan and presented me with a great deal on some Cards memorabilia. Bad move. My lifelong allegiance lies with a team that plays at the intersection of Clark and Addison … Read more
They can be painful. Of course, I’m referring to arguments about whether it’s okay to use those delightful little word combinations we call contractions. You know them: cannot becomes can’t, will not shortens to won’t, and so forth. When professional writers insert those handy contractions into copy, it often gives birth to a strange reaction … Read more
Strip and stripe are two words that look similar and are pronounced differently. More important, they convey strikingly different meanings. And yet both and their derivatives are constantly being used incorrectly by people who don’t know better. If you see a Facebook post selling a “striped” piece of furniture, it means one of two things. … Read more
Our society is more politically divided than it’s been for quite some time. Rational, respectful discussions have largely been replaced with angry tweets and angrier talking heads. Simple social media posts explode into angry battles in which both sides are so eager to promote their points that they don’t even read what they’re responding to. … Read more
One of the most misused sets of homophones — words that sound alike but are spelled differently and have vastly different meanings — is the principal/principle pair. I recently read a notice about a new project that included a “principle” address as its location. I’ve seen organizations boast about their “guiding principals.” And I’ve seen … Read more
One of the subjects I discuss most often is the tendency to use bigger words when smaller ones are actually more communicative. I blame it on a desire to sound more educated and impressive (and I think it goes back to those papers we wrote in college, when we tried to mask our ignorance by … Read more
Are there certain things that people don’t know but should, and that drives you to distraction? For me, one of the biggest is the difference between features and benefits. While that distinction has been talked about for years, and successful communications and sales professionals invariably advocate for emphasizing benefits over features, there continues to be a … Read more
Far too many people spatter what they write with words that don’t really need to be there. One of the best examples is the word “appropriate.” People have a tendency to work it into sentences to make them sound more important, even though that extra word really doesn’t add any value. A typical example? “Once … Read more
Imagine if each of us were to be doled out a set of exclamation points at birth, and once we used up our allotment, that was it. No more. That was an idea a writer friend once advanced, and I think it makes more sense than 99 percent of what comes out of Congress. The … Read more