I noticed that mother began to materialize around the edges of the copper vessel.
Did that sentence startle you? Confuse you? Baffle you? You might be surprised to know that it is a completely legitimate and accurate statement. It’s not unusual for mother to appear when someone is making alcoholic beverages, and it has nothing to do with the personal habits of the woman who brought you into this world.
I’m not a big movie fan, but I do manage to watch a few now and then. As you’d expect, I probably pay as much attention to the writing as what happens on the screen. I studied playwriting fairly extensively in college, and many of the devices and tactics used by screenwriters were developed by playwrights.
I have a fascination with how screenwriters use the script to advance the plot, but there is one device I absolutely despise. To me, it’s the sign of a lazy screenwriter who is looking for an effortless way to move the plot forward or explain something to the viewer. I cringe every time I see the device, which crops up more often in comedies than in other types of films.
Mistakes can be funny. They can be embarrassing. And when they’re in your marketing communications materials, they can also be costly or even dangerous. That’s why proofreading is so important.
My experience has taught me that there is a certain kind of error that proofreaders miss more often than any other kind … and it’s quite possibly the most embarrassing type (except perhaps for substituting a call-in sex line’s phone number for your own).
Marketing inspiration can be found in many odd places … including my air conditioner. When I called a local contractor to come out and make sure my air conditioner was ready for this summer’s version of global warming, they took down all the usual information, including my email address.
The day before the scheduled appointment, I received an email from the owners. At first, I thought it was just the standard confirmation message, but it wasn’t.
One of the biggest misconceptions about writing for business or promotional purposes involves those handy little word combinations that we call contractions. You’re familiar with them: cannot becomes can’t, will not shortens to won’t, and so forth.
When professional writers insert those handy contractions into the copy they develop, it often creates a strange reaction among their clients. Suddenly, those clients doubt the very competence of the writer they’ve hired or assume that the writer must have been poorly educated. Why? Because one or more of their teachers told them that using contractions was a big no-no.
While I’d never try to find the light side in the horrific tornados that scraped across the southern U.S. last week, I can’t let one story I read pass without comment. The story made reference to one of the Alabama communities that was devastated.
One line in the story read: Neighborhoods there were leveled by a massive tornado caught on video by a tower-mounted news camera that barreled through late Wednesday afternoon.
Did you catch what jarred my brain?
Quotation marks are a very familiar punctuation device, and we’d have a tough time surviving without them. As a famous writer once said, “Quotation marks allow us to identify what someone actually says, as opposed to simple statements being made by the writer.” Actually, I just made that quote up, but it illustrates one of the primary roles of quotation marks. The other is to denote when something is being lifted from another source.
There’s a third use for quotation marks, and it’s not well-understood. It’s to imply that something isn’t really what you’re presenting it as. For example, if I wrote that a necklace was made from “silver” or “real” silver, I’m implying that it’s actually an imitation. If I said that a particular political candidate is “smart,” I’m suggesting that she’s dumber than that proverbial box of rocks.
Even if your job makes you say something 150 times a day, never lose sight of the fact that it may be the first time your audience is hearing it.
I think about that every time I’m shopping in a store and the cashier or an employee on the PA mumbles “thank you for shopping with us.” They don’t mean it. They don’t even try to pretend that they mean it. It’s something they’ve been told to say, so they say it with no enthusiasm.
I’ll often receive emails asking me about specific rules of word usage. Or when I submit copy to a client, one of the reviewers will send it back with a comment asking whether I know the rule about something.
The grammarians in the crowd will hate me for saying it, but there really aren’t any rules about writing. There are simply preferences that the people who control the writing expect to see.
No, I’m not advocating violence against punctuation. And I’ll admit that the ampersand (that little “&” mark) can be handy now and then. But it’s one of the most-misused tools in the punctuation toolbox.
The ampersand serves as a graphic replacement for the word “and.” When used in graphic design, it can even be a thing of beauty — much prettier than those three letters it replaces. Designers will twist and turn ampersands, run words through and around them, or present them in different colors and typefaces.