Tag Archives: grammar

Word play: imputer or inputter?

Posted on by

WHEN WE WRITE down a word based on how it sounds, there is ample opportunity to make a spelling mistake.

In the past I have seen the confusion of imputer with inputter.

The verb to impute is to attribute something bad to someone (unjustly), such as a crime. It is also used to mean the incorrect attribution of something to a particular source. The noun ‘imputer’ would therefore refer to the person doing the imputing. However, I cannot find mention of this word in a dictionary – therefore it is either a nonsense or a neologism (take your pick).

In any case, it’s definitely not a word to be confused with inputter.

An inputter is a noun, referring to a person or machine responsible for entering data into a computer (from the root verb to input, or the root noun, ie, that which forms the input)

Input can be data or energy, material, or an amount of something intangible measured through a machine.

Perhaps there is scope for input data to be so terrible that it could be imputed to a source – I’m thinking of those who pass off poor company results to avert a financial crisis!

Five embarrassing typos to avoid at all costs

Posted on by

WHEN WE WRITE quickly with the intention of publishing or emailing our work ‘yesterday’, there is a real danger of inserting a mistake that we would not ordinarily make. Consequently, these mistakes have the effect of making us look like we don’t know our stuff. These are generally basic errors that could have been averted if we’d taken more care.

Quite worryingly for a small business, these sorts of mistakes can cost you new customers. While pedants are often irritating, small businesses and sole traders should not discount these people as potential clients!

Here are five mistakes it would be worth your while to avoid making.

The hurried three-letter word: We type the words ‘the’ and ‘and’ so regularly that we can become blind to the fact their characters are easily transposed. It’s always embarrassing to see when you’ve accidentally published ‘hte’ or ‘adn’. You may be lucky enough to have turned on your spell-checker, in which case these two words should auto-correct. But you should be reluctant to fall back on such a facility. Not all smart devices or apps have this built in. Proofreading will be your only friend!

The missed vowel: It’s all too easy to think you’ve typed a double letter (such as in too) only to find later on that you wrote ‘to’ by mistake. It’s especially easy to do if you’ve got a sticky keyboard or are using a smart device with a fast touch keypad. Auto-correct facilities on smart devices aren’t always tuned in to grammar, so the upshot is they may choose the wrong form of a word for you. Our advice is to read over what you’ve done carefully before hitting that send or publish button.

The missed consonant: Getting your vowels right is essential, but consonants are just as important. In fact, missed consonants can prove incredibly dangerous to your business. Leaving out certain letters will result in a different word being created than you intended, perhaps to great (but embarrassing) comical effect. Can you imagine a serious newspaper article describing the actions of a violent criminal, only to see in print that he has been described as a violet criminal?  Now imagine this kind of error writ large in the newspaper’s headline – an action liable to win it a spot on the satirical TV show Have I Got News for You. Now imagine such an error slipping through in your own business communications – your emails, leaflets, brochures etc. Not only will it cause unintended amusement, but you’ll probably have spent good money on the print run too.

The jumbled word: Another tricky and oft repeated mistake that your spell-checker won’t find is what I call the jumbled word. Let’s say you meant to write ‘Please fill in this form’. Later on you realise you wrote ‘Please fill in this from’ instead. Doh! There are so many words in the English language that use the same letters in a different order – we really do need to be vigilant. Here’s an even more embarrassing example. ‘John’s new brassiere is being opened tonight by a surprise celebrity guest’. The word should of course have been brasserie. I’ve seen this happen in print more times than I care to mention. If you’re opening a little bistro soon, pay very close attention indeed to your marketing material. The same applies if you’re opening a new underwear shop. You don’t want people trying to book tables for two in confusion.

The problem with public…: The problem with the word public, when you’re typing or reading very quickly, is that the letter L can become invisible very, very easily. I won’t spell this out in full to you. Simply look at the word public and imagine what word is created instead if you remove that L. Don’t fall foul if you can possibly help it!

Shudder people, and take note. Proofreading is very important to your business communications.

Spelling explained: dependant or dependent?

Posted on by

THERE ARE SO many words which sound the same and are spelled differently. To make matters more difficult, a number of these words have related meanings, making it even easier for anyone uncertain to pick the wrong one.

Take dependant and dependent – two words that are not interchangeable in UK English. Dependent is an adjective whose meaning is ‘to rely on someone or something for support’. For example:

Joseph is dependent on his son Dave for help with the shopping.

Dependent is also used to indicate a need, or dependency, eg:

Chloe is drug dependent.

Dependant on the other hand is a noun, and so refers to the person or people who are involved in a dependent relationship. Usually dependant is used when referring to someone who relies financially on another’s help. For example:

Mary has three dependants: her daughters Carol and Avis, and her son Doug.

There is of course a complicating factor: this rule only applies in UK English. In US English, the word dependant does not exist. They use dependent interchangeably.

The UK versus US English problem is something that will continue to challenge us for many years to come – the only question I have is how long will it take for one form to dominate and wipe out the other?

Are we really in the lap of luxury?

Posted on by

AS IS CUSTOMARY for me when making a point about the power of language, I’d like to start with a dictionary definition, paraphrased from the Collins Dictionary of English:

“Luxury (noun) – indulgence in and enjoyment of rich, comfortable and sumptuous living; something that is considered an indulgence rather than a necessity. Also a modifier (ie, luxury yacht)”

Pretty much everyone in Great Britain lives in some semblance of luxury if we apply the notion of comfort relative to the world as a whole. Even poorer people here tend to have a roof over their heads and access to food – along with commodities that would seem in other parts of the world to be an indulgence.

But in marketing terms, ‘luxury’ is not referring to this kind of comfort. Luxury is being peddled on a widespread basis to consumers as a little extra, something perhaps they don’t yet have but should. Something they can afford but believed they could not. Often the campaigns that use words like luxury involve other attempts at temptation, using words like ‘deserve’, ‘naughty’ and ‘treat’.

Now I’d like you to think about how often and in which situations you might commonly see the word luxury used. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have seen it on billboards advertising package holidays and high street clothes; you’ll have read it on countless hoardings to promote a new development of matchbox-sized houses and flats; you will almost certainly have heard it repeated in adverts on the TV, usually in relation to some generic bathing products or a cheap yoghurt.

In this context, how do consumers retain the ability to spot luxury when something is merely ‘good’ or ‘nice’? Will people eventually grow tired of marketeers telling them that a dollop of chocolate flavoured milk pudding is the height of luxury when they know full well it’s just a welcome comforter at the end of a bad day? Has the word’s meaning been lessened, and are consumers knowingly complicit because it makes them feel better to believe they are better off? I think the extent to which the word luxury is used is so ubiquitous as to render it an expectation or a right. Luxury as a concept then becomes commonplace – which is absurd, because by the very nature of its meaning, luxury cannot be so.

Compare overuse of the word luxury (and the related ‘luxurious’) in the mainstream with the actual luxury brands market. High-end products and their marketing teams very rarely use the word luxury at all. Instead, they employ a whole range of other marketing conventions to sell their products. Words will be used sparingly, perhaps even just the name of the brand itself. They are likely to sell the brand by using a very famous face, often without promoting a specific product. They are unlikely to show prices. Photography will be of the highest order, with perfect lighting and flawless post-production. Products themselves come in boxes and bags that are sumptuous to the touch.

Someone can see a high-end marketing campaign and immediately know its aim is to show you what luxury looks like. But it generally won’t tell you it’s luxurious. This subtlety is used not only to market high-end fashion, but also real estate, vehicles and holidays.

If people understand the conventions of exclusivity in marketing, it then follows that shoppers also understand the selling of false luxury as aspiration – be it a fat-free yoghurt or a new sofa they don’t actually have to pay for until the stuffing is oozing out of its fraying seams.

The problem with the retail sector is that its success is built on a constant round of consumption. It provides a huge swathe of jobs that the UK cannot afford for people to lose. So if the peddling of aspiration is what it takes to keep retail rolling in an uncertain economy, we’ll be hearing a lot more about false luxuries yet.

Frankenwords – a guest post for Content Desk

Posted on by

HERE’S A LINK to another guest post I created for Content Desk, the web portal by Progressive that’s linked to their Content Cloud – a system matching up professional writers with blue chip companies in need of content.

This post focused on the phenomenon of Frankenwords – those marketing buzzwords where two normal words are spliced together to form another. They’re excruciatingly annoying, but nothing it seems can stop their march…

http://desk.thecontentcloud.net/features/frankenwords-use-run-mile#.VBMMOLYr6Jg

Proofreading for business – a guest post

Posted on by

HERE IS A link to my guest post for the Content Desk, a web portal about creating good online content for business.

This is a shorter version of my original Word Wizard post about improving your proofreading skills.

http://desk.thecontentcloud.net/guides/six-steps-perfect-proof-reading#.VBMMT7Yr6Jg

Word play: continually or continuously?

Posted on by
Reply

DO YOU EVER write a sentence and hesitate over a word? It’s a word you know you know, but somehow when it’s written down it doesn’t look quite right. You can’t quite put your finger on what is wrong with your sentence. So you leave it as it is, and move on.

Sometimes a word will seem correct because it appears similar to another word. In fact, no spell checker will pick up your error, because you have, in fact, correctly spelled a word. It’s just not the word you were after! Take the following example:

Jess was annoyed because her little brother continuously interrupted while she worked.

We understand perfectly the meaning of the sentence: Jess’s patience is being tested by her brother, who won’t leave her alone. But does the word continuously properly belong in this sentence? Would the word continually work better?

First there is the similarity between these two adverbs to contend with. Continually and continuously each derive from an adjective that has the same root – continue. Continue is an intransitive verb, meaning ‘to maintain a condition or course’.

Continuously is defined under continuous in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as ‘uninterrupted’. Continually however, is listed as ‘constantly or frequently recurring; always happening’. They are accompanied by a usage note.

Oxford asserts that ‘continual’ means to happen frequently but ‘with breaks in between each occurrence’. ‘Continuous’ and its uninterrupted interpretation is taken as truly incessant. So the example above should in fact read:

Jess was annoyed because her little brother continually interrupted while she worked.

This is because at some point Jess will stop at her task, forcing a break. The use of the word ‘constant’ above for exaggerated effect is perhaps what is actually confusing the sentence. As a literary device, Jess feels as though her brother constantly interrupts, but this is not really true.

Perfect proofreading: part two

Posted on by
Reply

LAST WEEK I uploaded a post containing my first five tips for perfect proofreading. It really is possible to publish and print great content if you take the time to look for the most common errors. Here are my final five tips for achieving this.

6 – Look for inconsistency. Have you used capital letters throughout your document, not just as the start of sentences? If so, have you used them consistently? Same goes for numbers. Do you use a mixture of numerals and words, ie. Ten or 10. What about bullet points? Have you used a mixture of numbers and blobs? It doesn’t matter what you choose, as long as you only use the one style throughout your document.

7 – Punctuation. Are there full stops where they are needed? What about quotation marks, question marks, commas? The placing of a comma can change the meaning of a sentence, so be careful where you put them. Reading your document aloud can help you to work out where the emphasis of punctuation ought to be.

8 – Have a break. If your document is long, you will tire of looking for mistakes and stop being able to spot them. Do it the next day if you have time.

9 – Read your work backwards. This might seem odd, but reading from the end of the document to the beginning can help some people spot spelling errors more easily, because you’re not anticipating the word order or the flow of a sentence.

10 – Ask someone else to read your document. If only for the sake of a second pair of eyes when you’re tired and on a deadline. We all have different strengths and abilities to spot errors. Someone good at maths might spot an error where you have used numbers. Some people have great awareness of space, and might spot an extra return or indent where there shouldn’t be one. Someone might be good with names, and able to spot an inconsistency, ie. Ann or Anne.

And that’s really all there is to it! Best of all, if you take your time and check all the elements outlined above, you will eventually acquire the confidence you need to get things right every time.

Perfect proofreading: part one

Posted on by
Reply

HAVE YOU EVER looked back at work you’ve done and wondered just how it ended up with so many mistakes in it? Do you always discover these errors when it’s too late, and you’ve already sent out your customer email or sent your leaflet to be printed 5,000 times? If this is the case, then you’ve come to the right place for some tips on improving your work. All it takes is a little time and patience. Here are our first five tips. A second part follows next week:

1 – Print out your document on A4 paper. Include a 2cm margin all round, and in double line spacing. Use a font that is easy to read, and isn’t elaborate (such as this one, which is Arial). The idea is to make the page as plain and simple as possible for reading. Print in black.

2 – Read through once without making any marks. You’re looking to make a mental note of any ‘red flags’ that come up as you read.

3 – Choose a contrasting coloured pen to make your corrections. Mark it so that you can see clearly what you’re doing and will understand your marks when you come back to them later.

4 – Go through your document line by line at a slowish pace. Pause at the end of each line. Does it make sense? If you need to read a line multiple times to understand it, it’s an indication that there is something amiss. Make a mark to come back to it later. This is not the time to rewrite that line.

5 – It’s time to target spelling. Don’t rely on a built-in spell checker. For a start it may default to USA English, which has some marked differences to UK English. If a word strikes you as oddly spelt, look it up, using a hard copy or online dictionary. Is it the correct form of the word – ie. Too, to or two? See our other tips section online for help in this area.

Word play: envisaged or envisioned?

Posted on by

What can of worms have I opened with use of ‘envisaged’ versus ‘envision’ I wonder? Probably a debate over whether it’s best to UK English or American English!

That’s because ‘envisage’ and ‘envision’ technically mean the same thing: to visualise something or make a mental picture of it. A future possibility if you will.

Your choice between these two transitive verbs depends largely on whether you prefer the UK English ‘envisage’ to the American ‘envision’ – or whether to have a preference would be frowned upon (for example, do you work in America, or are you writing a piece for an English university?).

The danger with either word is that they should not be used in place of ‘expect’, to which they are closely related. ‘Expect’ can be used in a context where you are more certain of the outcome (ie, ‘the government is expected to report a lowering of interest rates’).