Writing, Clear and Simple

My daughter’s band teacher says he has only one rule for his students: “Use your head.”

Eminently sensible advice, really. So much pain can be avoided by applying that little maxim to everything in life, little or big. “Use your head.”

Just ask Katrina Jorgensen if she regrets not using her head before pressing the Send button on one little e-mail message.

Jorgensen is—or rather was—an employee of The Great Marquee Company of New Zealand. After a couple considered and then rejected having The Great Marquee Company supply a marquee for their wedding, Jorgensen fired off an archetypical sour-grapes e-mail message that said their wedding plans were “cheap, nasty and tacky,” and that the firm’s marquees were intended for “upper class clients,” not clients like them.

E-mail may offer many things, but it absolutely does not guarantee that a private message will stay private. Jorgensen’s little snit didn’t stay private (as this story from the New Zealand Herald shows), and it had a daisy-cutter impact on her reputation, and that of The Great Marquee Company.

So, before you press “Send,” use your head! 

(Hat tip to Paulo.) 

Yes, I’ve been absent for a while. Some paying projects were taking up my time, so something had to give (and that something is NOT going to be my family).

Anyway, things are calming down a bit, so I’m working on a book review (the book is on using e-mail effectively) that I’ll be posting in a day or so. In the meantime, here are some useful links:

• A headline can make the difference between your audience reading the rest of your piece or passing it over as irrelevant. Here’s a quick guide to writing great headlines. (Via Lifehacker.)
• Do you need to write for a Spanish-speaking audience? Take a look at the U.S. Government’s “Spanish Language Style Guide and Glossaries for U.S. Government Web Sites.” You might find something that makes your job easier. (Via The New Legal Writer.)
• Few people spend much time thinking about onomatopoeia — mostly because they have no idea what it is. It refers to those words whose sound is very like what they refer to, like thud or buzz. Garr Reynolds has a nice riff on taking advantage of onomatopoeia to emphasize a point. Reynolds is writing in terms of oral presentations, but the principle applies in writing as well.
  

I occasionally occassionally browse through my referral logs to see what sort of search terms people used to find this site. Some of the time, it’s clear that they find an article that answers their questions. For example, I constantly see people searching for “bad news messages,” and Google takes them directly to my article, “Delivering Bad News.” It’s clear, however, that they haven’t always found what they were looking for on my site—not until now, anyway. This post will attempt to answer some of those unanswered questions. 

1. What does the word exodus mean?

Before I answer that, one little point: If you can’t or won’t buy yourself a good dictionary, bookmark this site: www.thefreedictionary.com. Use a dictionary or go to a dictionary site, rather than googling a word when you want the definition. “The right tool for the job,” and all that.

Now, to the definition (from thefreedictionary.com, by the way):

1.  A departure of a large number of people.
2. Exodus

a. The departure of the Israelites from Egypt.
b.  Abbr. Ex or Exod.

Usage note: Never write mass exodus. An exodus is already a “mass” event. Mass exodus is a pleonasm. (Exercise for the class: go look up “pleonasm.”)

2. starting a sentence with if

That’s easy: If you think you shouldn’t start a sentence with “if,” you’re wrong. See?

3. what does “a little song a little dance a little seltzer down your pants” mean

That phrase goes back to the Mary Tyler Moore show, in which it was said to be the catch phrase used by Chuckles the Clown. You can read more here on Wikipedia. 

4. Grammar question is it all your or all of your?

 Both. No, really. As far as I know, either one is fine, grammatically speaking, so trust your ear to let you know which one sounds better in a given situation.

5. can i use semicolons to list things

I find paper and pencil works better. As far as punctuation goes, a colon is more appropriate to set off a list, like this: 

Here is a list of stuff: Item A, Item 2, and Cranberries.

You can also use it to introduce a bulleted or numbered list. Find out about the uses of the semicolon here.