The other day Staples sent an email with a subject line that read, “Over 60% off this LITERALLY hot item.” I opened it to find a picture of a toaster oven.
Oh, Staples, you sabotaged your pun. You have an item that is literally hot to the touch and is... (Read More)
A certain celebrity told a reporter from Fortune magazine that she was being mindful of her alignments. She wasn’t referring to her yoga poses. She was talking about her decision to get involved with a company that reflects her values and her lifestyle brand.
Corporate America loves the word align... (Read More)
“There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.” So wrote William Zinsser in On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. Zinsser, who died last week at 92, implored people to write simply, clearly, and briefly. “If you find... (Read More)
The other day a snazzy-looking magazine from Chevrolet arrived in the mail. The automotive company clearly had spent a lot of money on it. I flipped to the first page where my eyes landed on this greeting—rendered in big, bold type: “Welcome to the Premiere Issue of New Roads.”
Problem... (Read More)
I’m continually bemused by how frequently writers mistakenly put quote marks around words and phrases—and inadvertently amused by the effect of the incorrectly quoted matter.
Here are the five cases in which it’s correct to use quotation marks. The last two seem to spark the most misuse, as you’ll see... (Read More)
Maximize and optimize crop up a lot in business communication. We blithely use them to make upbeat—yet ultimately hollow-sounding—statements that prevent us from saying how we’re going to make the most of the thing in question (maximize) or make it perfect or fully functional (optimize). When that happens, we miss... (Read More)
“As CFO she helped improve resource optimization across different businesses through better capital and funding allocation, as well as expense reductions.” That line appeared in the press release Google issued last month announcing it had hired Morgan Stanley’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat.
The words improve and optimization are a clumsy... (Read More)
New York City has a new program to encourage parents to talk to their babies. Its tagline is “Talk to Your Baby, Their Brain Depends On It.” When I first read that, I had a vision of some sort of collective baby with a single brain.
In spoken language, it’s... (Read More)
“I spent a lot of time in his office, talking commas,” recalled John McPhee in an interview with the Paris Review. McPhee was describing what it was like to work with William Shawn, the illustrious former editor of The New Yorker magazine. “He explained everything with absolute patience, going through... (Read More)
“Any woman should run a mile from a man who uses the verb ‘incentivize.’” So wrote Anthony Lane in his New Yorker review of the movie Fifty Shades of Grey.
Sound advice—and not just for women on the dating circuit. People in business should run from the word, too. It’s... (Read More)
