Only one of the following sentences is correct. Which one is it?
Because you say to whom, you might think the second sentence—the one with whomever—is the correct choice, but it’s not.
In...(Read More)
Here is a line of copy from a piece I was recently asked to edit: Make a list of the people who you will ask for help.
The who in the sentence should be whom: Make a list of the people whom you will ask for help.
The grammatical explanation for...(Read More)
Jerry Seinfeld was interviewed about what makes a good joke, and a lot of what he said makes sense for all writing. So, kidding aside, here are three elements of a successful joke that make for successful copy, too.
Brevity “You’re always trying to trim everything down to absolute rock,...(Read More)
A social worker walks into a patient’s hospital room and says to the patient’s wife, “You have to move him tomorrow to an L.T.A.C.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the wife responds. “What’s an L.T.A.C?”
This exchange appeared in a recent New York Times article about health literacy—the ability...(Read More)
“In the past, chief executives might have waxed about paradigm shifts and bleeding-edge technology, but ‘journey’ has lately been the go-to word in corporatespeak.”
That line appeared in a recent Wall Street Journal article poking fun at the overuse of journey, which, according to the report, has appeared in the...(Read More)
The holidays are upon us and with them lots of opportunities to wish people well. Putting those wishes to paper correctly, however, can be tricky. Is it, for example, Best wishes for a happy and healthy new year or Best wishes for a happy and healthy New Year?
Read these guidelines...(Read More)
I recently received a flurry of emails that share the same mistake: They all include statements incorrectly punctuated as questions. As a result, the authors sound uncertain, which I know was not their intent.
Here are the words—each with a hint of possibility—that seemed to trip them up.
Hope
“You have to use condoms and know with whom you go to bed.”
That’s what Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the now 90-year-old sex therapist, said in a recent interview with a New York Times reporter as she recalled some of the groundbreaking advice she gave in the early 80s.
She’s a straight...(Read More)
Howard Schultz’s recent letter to customers about Starbucks’s racial bias training was well written and took responsibility for the incident that led to the arrest of two men in one of the company’s stores. I couldn’t help but compare it to the letter Oscar Munoz, the CEO of...(Read More)
Bobbi Brown, founder of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, was talking about what it was like when the Estée Lauder Companies bought her brand back in 1995. As a creative person, she bristled at the nonsense of corporate-speak. “Things like ‘optimize’,” she recently told The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, flummoxed...(Read More)
