The good, the bad and the very bad

Another year rides off into the sunset, and a new one dawns. But before it does, here are the highlights of my blogging year:

• January: Big Business makes big mistakes, including dead bodies in planes and the toy that turned into a date-rape drug.
• February: It’s advertising, Jim - but not as we know it looked at product placement in film and TV.
• March: 10 ways to increase your productivity, from mind-mapping to Mavis Beacon.
• April: 5 ways to beat blank-page syndrome, to help you fill all that white space quickly.
• May: The uncomfortable truth about comfort zones might make you feel a bit…well, uncomfortable. But that’s the point.
• June: Are you underselling yourself? explored the fine art of getting the price right.
• July: What makes you different? talked about ways of standing out from the crowd.
• August: Think smart and beat the downturn was ahead of its time, and is even more relevant today than it was in the summer.
• September: The trouble with technology highlighted a problem: the technology.
• October: Country branding: lessons we can learn looked at why we think what we think about countries, and why Germany is way cool.
• November: The pitfalls of specials offers found that sometimes, they’re not that special.
• December: How to increase your chances of making the sale took us to the wonderful world of first-class travel (sort of).

And that’s it. See you in 2009.

You’re confused? Spare a thought for your readers.

In summer 2007, I decided I was stressed (long story, email me for all the juicy details). So I took myself off to a meditation course.

The course leader was a sweet old lady in her 70s. Grey hair piled into an unruly bun, skewered by a dark brown chopstick. A lived-in face and a sweet, sing-song voice.

To break the ice, she asked everybody where they were from. It all went smoothly until she reached a man in a rumpled tracksuit.

“And where are you from?” she said solicitously.

“Where,” he repeated in a dull monotone.

“Yes, where are you from?” she said again, the embodiment of indulgence and patience.

“Where,” he repeated, without the rising intonation of a question.

“That’s right - where are you from?” with not a hint of exasperation. (She was a walking advert for the benefits of meditation.)

“Where,” he said again. “W-a-r-e. It’s a place in Hertfordshire.”

We all smiled and heaved a collective sigh of relief. From there, the only direction was upwards.

***

Confusion is everywhere, in the written and the spoken word. And here are the second five in my Top 10 easily confused words.

1. affect / effect
   This one is guaranteed to set your head spinning, so take a deep breath before carrying on.

   Affect is usually a verb (dredge your memory banks - a verb is a doing word). So you might write the credit crunch has badly affected the housing market.

   Effect, on the other hand is usually (note the usually) a noun (a thing, in common parlance). I had three whiskies last night, and I’m still feeling the effects (a purely hypothetical example, you understand).

   Now here’s the chaser: effect can also be used as a verb. Nicolas Sarkozy promised to effect change in France.

2. imply / infer
   To imply is to suggest something: my boss implied that my work wasn’t up to scratch. In other words, he made it clear, without actually saying it straight out.

   It’s very often confused with infer. So here’s an easy way to remember which is which: imply is to do with sending, infer to do with receiving.

   So if, on the other hand, my boss made a remark about my work that was ambiguous, or open to interpretation, I might infer that my work wasn’t up to scratch.

   Luckily for me, I’m my own boss - so the implying and inferring is kept under one roof.

3. fortuitous / fortunate
   If you know the difference between these two words, then you’re very fortunate indeed - most people don’t.

   Fortuitous means by chance. It’s random, and not necessarily positive: the principal made the fortuitous discovery of my stash of cigarettes [bad].

   Fortunate means lucky. So I could say fortunately, the principal didn’t discover my stash of cigarettes [good].

4. they’re / there / their
   “If you are in your 40s and British,” The Economist wrote a couple of weeks back, “it is quite possible that your spelling is an embarrassment. You may never have been taught the distinction between “there”, “their” and “they’re”, or perhaps even your times tables.”

   It’s not just forty-something Brits, though. These three little words cause confusion among people of all ages and in all locations.

   They’re is a contraction of they are. There is the opposite of here. And their means of them.

   Put them all together and you have they’re going to put their bags over there.

5. led / lead / lead
   A few months back, a client corrected some copy I’d sent them. It had included the phrase this led to big increases in productivity. Her amended version read this lead to big increases in productivity.

   So who was right? Here’s a clue: not her.

   It’s an easy mistake to make. The past tense of lead is led. Unfortunately, it rhymes with lead (as in pipes, pencils and balloons). So there’s an understandable hesitation.

Unconfused? Good. Now perhaps you’d like to do something ahout your stress levels. I know a very good course.

Just email me and I’ll tell you Ware where.

You might not notice - but somebody will.

Several years ago, a friend of mine worked for a recruitment consultancy. Let’s call them Acme Inc.

Their contracting arm (which supplied staff to companies on a contract basis) was called Acme Inc. Independant Services.

Did you feel a twitch of discomfort as you read that? Good. So did my friend - and one day, over an end-of-the-week glass of Chardonnay, he mentioned it to his boss.

Independant, he explained, doesn’t exist. Dependant does (the woman had three dependants). Dependent does (the three children were dependent on her). Independent does (he stood as an independent candidate).

But independant doesn’t.

His boss, playing for time, drained his glass. Then, he smiled his twinkly smile, and slurred, “it’s a deliberate mistake. It shows that we really are different.”

My friend returned his smile, considered his career, and kept his mouth shut.

Write to the point

Good grammar is important to good writing. Would you consider showing a client around messy offices? How about answering the phone informally? Or having a logo that’s skew?

Of course you wouldn’t.

But somehow, dodgy grammar flies under the radar. At least, most of the time. For somebody out there will notice - and they’ll draw conclusions pretty fast.

So here are the first five of my Top 10 easily confused words.

1. who’s/whose
   Who’s is a contraction of who is. So you can say who’s at the door? But you can’t say the man who’s car I ran into. It’s an understandable mistake (Peter’s car, Jane’s car, who’s car). Instead, you should say the man whose car I ran into.
2. i.e / e.g.
   If you’re a Latin scholar, you’ll never confuse these. But most people nowadays don’t know their amo from their amas. i.e. stands for ‘id est’, which means ‘that is’. In other words, you’re explaining what you’ve just referred to (the Chancellor of the Exchequer i.e. the Minister of Finance). e.g. on the other hand, stands for ‘exempli gratia’, and means ‘for the sake of example’. It’s used when you’re giving one example among many. So you could write one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council e.g. France.
3. disinterested / uninterested
   It’s common nowadays to see disinterested used as the opposite of interested, as in my brother is disinterested in politics. It should be my brother is uninterested in politics. Disinterested means impartial or neutral, so you could say to resolve the dispute, we need a disinterested party to hold mediation talks.
4. principal / principle
   Just the other day, I read on a web site our guiding principals are honesty, integrity and efficiency. And that’s wrong. For a principal is more likely to guide a school, if anything. Or you could talk about a principal ballerina. If you’re talking about values, it’s principle every time.
5. it’s / its
   This is a very common mistake - and an understandable one. If you can say Peter’s hat and my uncle’s house, you’d expect to say the house lost it’s roof in the storm. But you don’t. Instead, you say its roof. It’s is a contraction of it is. So you could say it’s a lovely house (but not if it lost its roof in a storm).

If your head’s already hurting, then perhaps it’s time to lay lie down.

Part 2 next week.

…unless you’re absolutely sure about them

1. Use Latin if you’re writing in English

I’ve just been reading a blog post by one of my favourite bloggers.

He’s witty, intelligent and often makes me laugh out loud. His writes things I can’t find anywhere else (the Holy Grail of blogs) which is why he’s always on my must-read list.

And one of the things I really like is that his spelling is impeccable. Or at least, it used to be.  Because his latest post contains a glaring error.

Homo sapien.

It brought me to a juddering halt. In my mind’s ear, I could hear Mr Watson drumming his thin, bony fingers on the blackboard.

“Sapien, Mr Walsh?” he’d intone. “Sapien? Be so kind as to tell the class what part of speech that is.”

Just thinking about it sends a chill down my spine.

And more so because sapien isn’t any part of speech. It’s just a common-or-garden mistake. I can see how he got there, though. If homo sapiens means ‘men’, then you just knock off the ’s’ to mean ‘man’, right?

If only life were that simple.

This blogger used the Latin term because he wanted to appear just a touch cleverer, more educated and…more superior?

It didn’t work.

[Note for Latin lovers - or even lovers of Latin: homo sapiens is singular; the plural, never used, would be homines sapientes. Thanks, Mr Watson.]

2. Make fun of people (unless it’s yourself)

Oh dear. Hell’s Pizza has done it again.

I’ve written about the New Zealand pizza chain before. They like a walk on the wild side when it comes to marketing.

They’re the ones that created a pizza called ‘Lust’ that shipped with a free condom. And they ran an advert with Hitler with his arm outstretched with the line ‘It is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell’. (Jewish groups were outraged and the ad was withdrawn.)

Well last week, they crossed the line again.

This time, it was a Halloween promotion that had three dancing skeletons: Sir Edmund Hillary (the first man to climb Everest), the actor Heath Ledger, and the Queen Mother.

Hillary’s family said it was “in very poor taste.” (The campaign, not the pizza, you understand.) It too has been withdrawn.

Rachael Allison, Hell’s Pizza marketing director said the company was known for its controversial advertising, and that a lot of people loved it. She went on to say:

“Interpretation of this is always up to individuals and we are always mindful of that and always keep an eye on our tone of voice and try to keep on top of that.”

A little too much sauce, I think.

3. Assume that technology works

Your website’s got an e-commerce function so you never have to talk to people. It just runs itself, right?

Wrong.

I recently (re)discovered this when I tried to buy a USB pen drive. I dropped it into the basket, then clicked ‘Next’ to enter my details. Then ‘Next’ to go to the payment screen. I filled in my card details, and hovered over the ‘Pay’ button.

And that’s when the little seed of doubt sprouted into a green shoot and pushed through the soil.

Had I ordered the 2GB or the 4GB drive? I was pretty sure it was the 4GB one. But here’s the thing: I couldn’t go back, forward, or anywhere else. I couldn’t view the basket. It was ‘Pay’ or nothing else.

So I opened another browser, brought up the website again, found the contact number, phoned them up, got them to pull up the (pending) order and check that it was 4GB. It was, so I clicked ‘Pay’.

Not an example of technology at its best.

It’s also important to remember that technology is logical - ruthlessly logical. The sort of ruthless logic that caused AOL and Google to blacklist the northern English town of Scunthorpe as an obscene term (think about it).

The sort of logic that meant Google Alerts I set up a few months ago never reached me. Why? Because they were blocked by the Google’s Gmail spam filter.

The bottom line is this: technology is only as clever as the people who design it (not to mention the people who use it).

And that’s a pretty scary thought.

Find out more:

• Tasty pizzas and tasteless humour: ‘Grotesque’ NZ pizza ads dropped on the BBC news site.
• Brush up your Latin with Harry Mount’s Amo, Amas, Amat… and All That.
• Get all the dirt on the Scunthorpe Problem at Wikipedia.
• Want to set up a Google Alert? Click here. Then cross your fingers.

Lighten up and they’ll love you

Big companies are serious companies - right?

Well yes. Some of them are. They hide behind corporate logos, and style guides, and copy that strikes ‘just the right tone’.

Except that sometimes, it’s just the wrong tone. It makes them sound cold and distant, and puts a barrier between them and their (potential) clients.

So why do they do it?

Because business, they think, is a serious business. There’s no place for levity.

But there is.

I think therefore IBM

Think IBM and you think ‘Big Blue’. Dullness reigns. Except it doesn’t - at least not in their television commercials.

I’ve just been chuckling at their latest series of ‘Stop Talking, Start Connecting’ ads. They’re dealing with serious issues (security, business resilience, energy efficiency, globalisation) but they’re doing it in a humorous way.

Which means they get your attention.

‘Hey,’ you say to yourself, ‘maybe business resilience can be fun.’ (OK, well maybe that’s stretching it - but you get the idea.)

Not taking yourself too seriously is a great way of making sure people don’t switch off. UK smoothie company Innocent Drinks uses it very effectively in all their copy. The tone is sweet, appealing and funny.

In a word, innocent. What better way to build their brand?

You smile. They smile.

Microsoft does the same thing in its latest Windows advert with Bill Gates and comedian Jerry Seinfeld. It’s been slated by the critics, but it’s actually quite funny.

It’s not going to win an Emmy, but it does show the company has a sense of humour - and that’s important, when your (ex-)CEO’s got a reputation as the world’s richest geek.

Showing the human side of business is always a crowd pleaser. And nothing works better than laughing at yourself.

I should know - once, for a dare, in front an audience of 1,000, I dropped my trousers. And then, for the next 20 minutes, I did my presentation in my (Microsoft Office) boxer shorts.

As you can imagine, I had their total attention.

Find out more:

• Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld try out some Size 10s in the Shoe Circus advert (be sure you don’t miss Bill wiggling his boxer shorts).
• IBM sees the funny side of life with its Stop Talking, Start Connecting ads.