All Posts Tagged With: "grammar"

I figure I’ve typed about a billion words – give or take a small novel — in my 30-year writing career. To this day, I still use the old hunt-and-peck method, which means my brain often gets ahead of my fingers. The result is some pretty embarrassing mistakes in my work. I usually catch them while proofing, but the occasional boo-boo does slip through.

When that happens, a little bit of my credibility dies. My excuse is that I never learned how to touch type. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

But there are people out there who really don’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re” or “their” and “there” and “they’re.” In an effort to sound conversational, they write “I should of…” Worse, they leave their modifiers dangling. In public, no less.

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(Second in a series of articles about improving your writing.)

By fourth grade in my Catholic grade school, the good nuns had drilled into my head all the parts of speech, the punctuation rules and grammar regulations that were never to be broken, lest they show up on my permanent record. We diagrammed long, rambling sentences, marking the nouns with one red line and the verbs with two, adjectives with a diagonal and adverbs with a squiggly mark. By the time we were done, our diagrams looked like schematics for the Space Shuttle.

At the risk of getting a rap on the knuckles, I’m here to tell you to forget all those rules.

Writing is about communicating. It’s about making the reader feel comfortable with your words, about setting a friendly tone, about being clear and concise. It’s not about blindly following archaic rules that can get in the way of effective communication.

Here are a couple of rules I’m giving you permission to break without fear of an icy glare from the nun in the front of the room:

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My mailbox has been a fertile source of blogging inspiration during the last week.

The Good. A small green envelope with vaguely familiar handwriting stood out from the stack of bills when I walked back from getting the mail one morning. It didn’t have a return address and the postage included a 41 cent stamp and a one-cent stamp. Intrigued by the personal look and hefty feel — I could tell there was something substantial inside — I opened it first. Inside, was a page that seemed to have been torn out of a local newspaper, with a yellow sticky note attached. “Joseph,” it read in the same handwriting as on the envelope. “I’ll make you an awesome deal.” It was signed by someone named “Cory.” Only then did I realize this was a carefully crafted direct mail piece sent on behalf of a local car dealership. I haven’t been called “Joseph” since third grade and I don’t know anyone by the name of Cory. The “newspaper” page was actually an ad for the dealership’s Grand Opening Sale. Kudos to whoever designed and executed that piece. It didn’t make me buy a car but it sure made me aware of their sale.

The Bad. The jumbo postcard for a company advertising its trash hauling services was attractive enough. It had all the right elements: it caught my attention, it had a powerful offer and a strong call to action. Only one problem: I live in a community where our trash is collected by the municipality. We don’t get a choice of haulers. If they sent the same postcard to all 2,500 households in the borough, that’s huge waste of money.

The Ugly. A local Realtor sent a postcard touting his success in a tough market. Unfortunately, he cited sales data that was a year old, misidentified a local landmark and had 11 — count ‘em 11 — spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors. Didn’t do much to enhance his reputation as a “someone who will pay attention to every detail of your deal.”

The moral? If you’re going to do direct mail, go the extra mile to make it memorable. And if you keep it simple, at least target the right market and use spellcheck!

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When my roof needs to be repaired, I call a contractor because I don’t like heights. When my car breaks down, I call a mechanic because I don’t have the right tools. When my refrigerator goes on the fritz, I call a repairman because I don’t know the difference between a compressor and a condensor.
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