I hope you find my writing and business tips and observations useful. My business and blog are dedicated to helping businesses communicate clearly and reach their potential.
Read, and enjoy!Tash
Capital letters…
There are certain times when you must use a capital letter:
- to start a sentence
- for a proper noun (e.g. the name of a person, place or event)
- in acronyms (e.g. the ATO, ASAP, TV)
The rest of the time, lower case letters are not only suitable – they are correct and preferred.
It Is Very Annoying To Read A Sentence Where Every Word Starts With A Capital Letter Isn’t It? And it takes more time and effort to type, too! Despite what some marketers would have you think, these extra capital letters do not make your message clearer or more important, and they certainly won’t bring in more sales. In fact, many people will see all those extra capitals and consider it a tacky attempt to manipulate them and therefore are less likely to even read their message.
It also just looks like you don’t know much about grammar or appearing professional.
And I’m not just talking about using capitals for every word, either. For instance, I received an email stating:
The first of these will address issues in Web Writing. The other two will focus on Web Accessibility: a half day Overview workshop and a full day Techniques Workshop. These are excellent programs.
There is no reason for ‘web writing’, ‘web accessibility’ or ‘techniques workshop’ to start with capitals – they are not proper nouns and shouldn’t be treated a such. As for ‘overview’, I can’t imagine why someone thought it needed a capital letter!
I find misuse of capitals bad enough – but for someone advertising a writing course, I expect much better than this! I wonder if they addressed the issue of using capitals in web writing – online, capitals are considered as yelling so really should be avoided in your web and email writing.
Check details – and check again
Let’s face it not everyone will notice or care about a couple of small spelling or grammatical mistakes. But getting the details correct is absolutely critical.
Make sure you go back and check details in your work – whether it is something you have written, a professional wrote for you or a graphic designer has worked on for you. Ideally, get someone else to check your document just for details.
If in doubt at how easy it can be to make such mistakes, here are some real life examples…
- A marketing flyer for a local shopping strip where each shop added their ad looked great except for one little detail – they spelt the name of the suburb incorrectly! And I know because I saw the flyer in circulation so it went out without being corrected.
- A course registration form included a second page with the following under the header:
Invoice Date: 18 December 2008 - A business sent out invitations to an event that cost them a lot of money to arrange. The invitations were sent out stating a day and date that didn’t match so they risked many people not turning up.
- 500 business cards were printed with the wrong mobile phone number because no one checked the original source. Luckily, the problem was noticed before any cards were given out.
- 100,000 letterhead were printed before anyone realised the disclaimer mentioned another (related) company name. Could you afford this sort of reprint?
- a book on small business quoted someone but used the wrong first name for her, which put her offside and made it hard for readers to research that woman
- the male CEO of a Melbourne company was named in a photo in an industry magazine – however, the photo was a woman and the article was not even related to the CEO or his company.
So while you won’t be alone with such mistakes, your credibility is better if you take the time to make sure details are present and correct. The cost of not checking can be huge.
Misuse of English
I found the following sign (posted in Germany’s Black Forest) to be a funny translation – at least I hope the translating is what caused the bad expression!
It is strictly forbidden on our black forest camping site that people of different sex, for instance, men and women, live together in one tent unless they are married with each other for that purpose.
I wonder what other sexes there are as men and women are only examples of the possibilities!
Want it written better?
Unmarried males and females must not share a tent in the Black Forest Camping Site.
Makes more sense and is simpler, but nowhere near as funny 🙂
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