I was driven to write today’s post by the number of grammatical errors and misspellings I come across regularly, on websites, blogs and paper-based promotional material for all types of businesses – often the first contact I have with an organisation. There is nothing more irritating to a word nerd like me than grammatical glitches, clunky copy and sloppy spelling. That’s not to say that writing outside traditional grammatical rules is always a bad thing. After all, the purpose of communication is to convey a message – and sometimes it can be more effective to take the grammatical “road less travelled” to get your message across. The problem is that some errors are so very bad that it’s obvious they were made from ignorance or a lack of attention to detail. And the bad news for business owners is that such semantic saboteurs can impact negatively on the public’s perception of both their brand and their business. So here’s my personal hit list of errors that dumb down brands – and turn off prospective customers and clients. The Wandering Apostrophe In my eyes, the worst offender of all is the wandering apostrophe. As a punctuation symbol, it looks innocent enough, but oh! how that little curve grates on my nerves when it’s used incorrectly, particularly when it’s used to denote a plural. Apostrophes are generally happiest when used to indicate the omission of one or more letters (for example, the contraction of “it is” to “it’s”); and to indicate the possessive case (for example, “the cat’s fur”). The use of apostrophes to denote plurals (for example, “the sentence contained two comma’s”) is wrong, as is a significant exception to the possessive case rule above – the use of “it’s” to denote ownership. Whenever I see “it’s” used to indicate possession, I can’t help but expand the contraction – to me “the cat licked it’s fur” reads “the cat licked it is fur”. Such errors are not only grammatically wrong, but can smack of unprofessionalism to prospective clients who care about such things. Heterographs Almost as bad as the uncorralled apostrophe is the incorrect use of “your” versus “you’re”, “too” versus “to” and “their” versus “there”. It’s really not that hard to take a few seconds to think about what you’re trying to say and check that your words reflect your intent. In fact, it’s so easy, why would you not do so, when initial impressions of your business and brand are at stake? Weasel Words Weasel words are words that are deliberately used to gloss over bad news, or to make a statement misleading; for example, “Send in your details and be in the draw to win a car every day for a month.” The reality is, of course, that a draw will be held each day of the month in question, with a car allocated as the prize of each individual draw. But the copy was written in such a way that it implies the winner of the draw would win between 28 and 31 cars, delivered in daily increments over the period of one month. Weasel words fool very few people and can lead to a perception that the business using them is focused on spin rather than service – “selling the sizzle rather than the sausage”. Comma casualties Reading text that places commas incorrectly, or fails to use them at all, puts me into a state of punctuation paranoia – for example, the difference in meaning between “Let’s cook, James” and “Let’s cook James” is quite significant – and all due to the strategic use of a comma.
Dangling participles
“Eating my lunch, the sun shone brightly.” Really? The sun was eating the writer’s lunch while shining brightly? Of course not. What the writer meant to say was “As I was eating my lunch, the sun shone brightly”.
If the meaning of a sentence is anything less than crystal clear, it’s time for a redraft! Unfortunately, the damage an unaware business owner can do to their brand doesn’t stop with the written word. Are you as tired as I am of hearing clichés like “singing from the same hymn sheet” thrown into business conversations? And what about speakers who read their PowerPoint presentations out to the audience word for word? It’s really not that hard to enhance your brand through the effective use of communication tools. That’s why it’s so irritating when a business doesn’t.
