Catching grammar goofs could be an entertaining game as they pop up in social media—-if the prevalence of such errors didn’t make it boring child’s play. But occasionally, something surprises me. I grabbed my bowl of cereal and sat down to the breakfast table this morning only to read this copy in big bold print [...]
Get those hyphens out of hiding and use them. Clarity often depends on it. And when clarity is not the case, proper use just puts you at the head of the class.
It happened again. Just about the time I’m ready to leave the office for the day and head home, an email pops into my inbox from our marketing director, Kari. The forwarded subject line from my publisher says “URGENT.” Kari’s email basically states that yes, I can be available for an interview with a newspaper journalist that day [...]
Are you curious about the three punctuation errors that surface most often when participants bring writing samples to our business and technical writing workshops? Although we haven’t kept a formal list, hands down, these are the three that take top honors: Run-on sentences (missing or inadequate punctuation) The biggest punctuation pitfall that renders a sentence [...]
At the risk of offending, I’m posing a question here that maybe some of you can weigh in on with your theories. Though not something that keeps me awake at night, my curiosity grows year by year—in fact, every time we post a job opening and go through the interviewing process as we’ve just now [...]
When McGraw-Hill released my latest book Booher’s Rules of Business Grammar: 101 Fast and Easy Ways to Correct the Most Common Errors, I stumbled across the Facebook group, “I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar.” Well, it looks as though these Facebook group members are not alone. Marketing guru Seth Godin also admits to [...]
Sucking the Life Out of Strong Verbs Almost daily TV broadcasters make announcements like these: Sydney Lancaster went missing yesterday after leaving work at 6:00 in his red Toyota. Went missing? Is this like gone fishing or gone to the movies? Whatever happened to Sydney IS missing. We don’t know that he went anywhere. In [...]
Suppose you are CEO and your VP of sales says to you, “The client rejected our proposal, and you may also be surprised to discover that our name has been removed from the bidders list.” You’d probably be wondering who removed your name from the client’s bidders list. The sentence doesn’t provide that information. And [...]
At the risk of sounding hysterical, let me make a broad generalization: Poor grammar has become an epidemic. Everywhere you look, grammar gremlins greet you. In a recent email in my in-box: “Completing this analysis can have a tremendous positive affect on your business.” On a political campaign billboard: More Doctors, More Nurses, Less Bureaucrats [...]
Have you ever “dismissed” someone because of their grammar? For example, on a social networking site, have you ever read through someone’s profile and noticed errors like who’s for whose and employee’s for employees or sentences that continued for seven lines without a period? Seeing so many errors, have you ever clicked away, deciding that maybe a [...]
