Impact the World?
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- On November 7, 2018
This installment of “Say It Better Say It Right” comes from an ad campaign for UBS.
This installment of “Say It Better Say It Right” comes from an ad campaign for UBS.
Last March, I wrote about three truck drivers in Maine who sued Oakhurst Dairy for more than four years of overtime pay. The lawsuit hinged on the absence of a serial comma. The serial comma is the one that goes before the conjunctions and or or in a list of... (Read More)
Enclosed is an Action Plan for the Administration of President Donald J. Trump, which will help in getting America’s coal miners back to work.
That was the opening line in a letter to Vice President Pence from the head of Murray Energy.
Environmental concerns aside, the sentence should have read,... (Read More)
With an incredibly demanding schedule full of 13-plus-hour days, every effort is being made to maximize Secretary Price’s ability to travel outside of Washington to meet with the American people.
That was part of the statement put out last month by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in... (Read More)
The handsome man and I made some chitchat as we prepared for the meeting. Distracted, I dilly-dallied and ended up making a mish-mash of my presentation, so I ate a couple of Kit-Kat bars to console myself.
What am I talking about?
Nonsense, really. I’m just demonstrating the rule of... (Read More)
My sister was back again, this time asking what I thought of FBI Director James Comey’s farewell letter to his staff. I told her I thought it was good—short (185 words!), to the point, and sincere. The takeaway was clear: Stay focused on the work you do... (Read More)
Is this a good letter?
That’s the question my sister asked me when she was wondering what I thought about the correspondence every United Airlines’ customer received from the carrier’s beleaguered president, Oscar Munoz, in the wake of the company’s recent public relations nightmare.
The letter had been sent in... (Read More)
The actress Allison Janney, interviewed in The New Yorker about her role in “Six Degrees of Separation,” grimaced as she cited a quote from the play. About the offending wording, she said, “A sentence like that is so hard to understand.”
I often wince when I read sentences encumbered with... (Read More)
When President Trump suggested Sweden had been attacked by terrorists, the former U.S. ambassador to that Scandinavian country noted, “It begs the question of where the president gets his information.”
While it’s easy enough to know what the ambassador meant, he used begs the question incorrectly. The expression doesn’t actually... (Read More)
“It felt kind of sexy.”
That’s how a friend described what it was like to have his essay—an application for admission to a PhD program—edited. Every time I told him to cut something— “The reader understands that, you don’t need it”—he got more energized. So too did his essay. The... (Read More)