Business Writing and Communication Training

Your Business Communications Are YOU

2007-05-12T17:35:00.000-04:00

A communications from your company – regardless of who writes it – is your company. Whatever format; letters, memos, reports, or emails, written words represent you to clients, co-workers, and customers. What your employees write and how it's written represents your entire organization in the minds of the readers. You can't afford to appear in linguistic disarray any more than you can in sartorial slovenliness.

Effective Business Communications
To stay productive and profitable, your employees need to be aware of the importance of the proper use of grammar, syntax, and punctuation. Their word choices need to be accurate and clear. The structure of their communication media must be correct.

Effective Email Communications
Your employees need to be trained in the skills of email communication to maintain:
· Professionalism – properly written emails convey a professional image
· Efficiency – properly written emails save time and money
· Protection – properly written emails can help avoid legal actions

Effective Offshore Communications
Success in business dealings too often depends on communication with people whose first language isn't American English. If anyone is not sure when the 08/11/07 meeting will be held, what time half-ten is, and what 2.45 means, writing for a non-American audience can present many unexpected, confusing, and costly missteps.

Call on Bill Moore
The Professional Business Language Workshops are created to address any or all of these areas of written language for your specific business. For information on customized content, scheduling, and pricing, call 248.547.8217 or email moore_words@comcast.net.

This Will Affect You, and the Effect Will Be Long-lasting

2007-05-01T22:32:00.000-04:00

OK, boys and girls, let’s try it one more time. All together, now: When do you use affect and when do you use effect? And the answer? For most people, it’s, “Damned if I know.” Of all the near-homophonic words in our language, these two seem to cause the most people the most trouble. They look too much alike, they sound too much alike, and they never mean the same thing. What’s a body to do?

My personal approach is to keep a copy of Write Rite Right close at hand so I can look up the correct usage. Barring that, just a single sheet of paper will hold all the information you need. The difficulty arises from being able to sort out the nuances in the use of the words. The only approach that works for me is to have the various meanings noted and then to have as many examples as possible of sentences in which the words are used correctly. That way, I can use a sentence as a model, and, by substituting my words in strategic places, I can write it right.

First off, let’s look at two givens: These two words have no senses in common. They’re easily mixed up, but they’re never interchangeable. An obvious reason for the confusion created by these words among writers is that any good dictionary will list about eight meanings for effect just as a noun. Then there’s effect as a verb and affect as either a noun or a verb. I’ve never counted all the possible meanings, but there must be about fifteen between the two. We’ll start trying to sort it out with affect simply because it’s the alphabetical thing to do.

Affect is most often used as a verb that relates to either influence or manner. It describes how actions influence conditions and other people or how and a person acts. I affect you when you read this. That’s the influence. I can affect a British accent. That’s the action. Most often, though, it’s used as a verb to mean to have an influence on. For example: Rising gas prices affect everyone one way or another.

Here’s a couple of good tricks you can use to test your usage. When you use affect in the sense of having a influence on, you should be able to substitute a form of influence in its place. So, you can write, “The high winds affected the level of the water in the bay.” You can also write, “The high winds influenced the level of the water in the bay.” When you use affect as a verb to mean a way of acting, you should be able to substitute put on in its place. You can write, “Why did she affect that attitude of sorrow?” Or, “Why did she put on that attitude of sorrow.”

Affect is also used as a noun to mean an external display of emotion. A person's affect is the expression of emotion or feelings seen by others. This use of the word is usually restricted to psychiatrists and social scientists, and, if you’re not in one of these fields, you could probably go most of your life without ever using affect as a noun. An example is: The Queen’s affect successfully masked her true feelings. BTW, the influence trick doesn’t work here. (So, we’ve already learned something useful. If you always use influence and put on and don’t become a psychiatrist, you’ll probably never have any trouble with affect.)

Effect is the word you’ll probably use 90% of the time. Fortunately, there’s some tricks that can help you use it right. First thing to remember is that effect always relates to causation. It describes something that results in action. That’s why it’s most often used as a noun that means a result or outcome. For example: What was the effect of your show of force? The trick is that when you use effect as a noun, it’s almost always preceded by an or the as in, “the effect on” or “an effect of” or by an adjective as in, “the awful effect.” Effect can also be an object as in, “purely for the effect.”

Effect, is sometimes used as a verb. In this case, it means to cause to happen or come about. For example: Rising gas prices effect a change in how people drive. The trick here is that when you use effect as a verb, you should be able to substitute a form of cause in its place. You can write, “The new rule effected the kind of change we hoped for.” You can also write, “The new rule caused the kind of change we hoped for.” Like affect as a noun, effect as a verb is not often used and seldom a problem.

Let’s see if we can put it all in a nut shell.

Uses as a verb:

Affect as a verb shows a direct influence or a manner of behavior. Your words affect me deeply. The words have a direct impact. How I feel is a result of your words. The words change me. On the other hand, I can affect a sense of interest in what you say. I’m not interested, but I act like I am.

Effect as a verb shows a causal relationship. Your words effected a great change in me. The words didn’t change me, but they caused me to change.

Uses as a noun:

Affect as a noun relates to something that can be seen. It’s either a subject or an object in a sentence. He walked with an affect that made us wonder.

Effect as a noun is, logically, always a thing. It can be seen or felt. The drug’s effect was stronger than the doctor expected.

Words Used Well – No. 5: An Accurate Quote Can Be a Misquote

2007-03-07T12:50:00.000-05:00

Shakespeare didn’t want to kill all the lawyers, and Robert Frost didn’t think that good fences make good neighbors. Sometimes, people use famous lines by famous people to support their arguments. And, too often, the words they quote not only weren’t intended to support what they’re saying, they actually mean the opposite. Quoting out of context is no doubt as old as speaking out of turn. Which is fine as long as the quoter is using the quote to mean what it did originally. Otherwise, when someone says, “As Shakespeare said, first we must kill all the lawyers,” there’s always the danger of having someone like me say, “But Shakespeare didn’t say that.” Then, if I’m lucky, there’s a dispute that lets me explain that Shakespeare wrote the line in Henry VI Part 2 (Act IV, Scene II), but he never said anyone should kill lawyers. It wasn’t his opinion. In fact, he put the line, “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers,” into the mouth of Dick the Butcher who was part of a mob of rioters who knew what they planned was illegal and figured if there were no lawyers they wouldn’t get prosecuted. Besides being inaccurate, it’s not fair to Shakespeare—or any other speaker—to twist the meaning of his words.

It’s the same with the fence thing. Most of the time, “Good fences make good neighbors,” is used to support an argument in favor of fences by someone who never read the poem it’s taken from. In Mending Fences, the person making the statement is a neighbor with whom Frost disagrees. A few lines later, Frost wrote, “Something there is that does not love a fence.” Frost, in his own voice, says he doesn’t like fences unless they’re needed to keep livestock penned. He wrote:

“Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out.”

That’s why we have to be careful when we pull a quote out of the air and stick it in something we’re writing. We mustn’t confuse what an author wrote with what he or she believed. It’s so easy to do that when the quote is taken out of its context because it’s often necessary to have a character say something that is totally opposite what the writer believes in order to create dramatic conflict. Then, someone (again, who probably never read the original) will quote the character and claim that the author held the opinion. Good writing gets a bad rap because people quote, out of context, a character whom the writer intended as a bad example. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn has been called a racist book because of racist remarks by Huck’s father, Pap. In the context of the book, Twain paints Pap as the worst sort of bigot and all-around despicable person. Twain wasn’t racist, nor is the book. The character is, and it’s how Twain showed his opposition to racism.

Was Rudyard Kipling a racist or xenophobic because he wrote, “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet?” (Actually, Kipling did meet Twain in 1889, but that’s another story.) The first and last lines of “The Ballad of East and West” certainly seem to say that. What’s missed by the less-than-knowledgeable quoter is that the whole rest of the poem, and it’s a long one, tells of an Englishman and a Arab who become blood-brothers, which they could do, as Kipling wrote, because, “there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth!” If anything, Kipling would have us understand that people should be judged as individuals rather than by their race. It’s an example of, if I may quote Kipling, “hearing your words twisted by knaves to make traps for fools.” What do you suppose he meant by that?

Really Easy Grammar – No. 39: Their His Pronoun Troubles

2007-02-12T19:41:00.000-05:00

Everyone should be sure of the rules when they use an indefinite pronoun. Or, maybe, everyone should be sure of the rules when he uses an indefinite pronoun. Or else, when he or she uses. . . And that’s the problem. For many years, the Mavens of Grammar have stated , unequivocally, that indefinite pronouns (that includes all the pronouns with ”-one,” “-body,” and “-thing” at the end as well as “either,” “neither,” and “each”) are always singular and, therefore must always be mated with singular definite pronouns like “he,” “she,” “his,” and “hers” and never with the plural forms “they” or “their.”

Take the sentence, “Everyone above the level of department manager has his own parking space.” Simple enough. Meaning clear. Except that it indicates that everyone in the company is male. If that’s true, fine, but what if it’s not? How do you avoid incipient sexism when some of the managers are women? Grammar purists oversimplify it. They state, categorically: “Everyone”—meaning “every single one”—is singular, therefore, you use a singular pronoun. Since the “gender neutral” pronoun form is male; his, the correct construction is, “Everyone knows his place.” That would be fine if it served the purpose of clear communication. But it doesn’t, first of all because in this brave new century it would be hard to find many who would say that “he” is gender neutral—especially if you’re writing about an all-girl baseball team. “On the girls’ team, everyone knew his place,” just sounds silly.

OK, then, the grammar purists will say, the way to avoid the problem is to avoid indefinite pronouns all together. Write instead, “All employees above the level of department manager have their own parking spaces.” There. Problem solved. Except it isn’t because the solution is based on a faulty premise. Who said that indefinite pronouns are always singular? There are those among us who believe that “everybody” indicates a large group of bodies, “all the bodies,” rather than “every single body.” Others of us will argue that “they” is just as good a gender neutral pronoun as “he.” Who’s to say? Well, you could check with Jane Austin, Will Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, or the King James Bible just to name a few of the dozens who share this latter opinion.

In fact, the “singular their” construction goes back about 700 years and managed to co-exist with the “neuter masculine” construction for most of that time. Nobody seemed to be much concerned until late in the 1700’s or early 1800’s. That’s when the “prescriptive” grammarians began to attack in earnest because “singular their” didn’t fit with the “logic” of the Latin grammar they were forcing English into. So, it became bad grammar in the same arbitrary way that splitting infinitives and putting a preposition at the end of a phrase did.

The situation is getting a lot of attention currently. There are whole Web sites that address almost nothing else. Each of them contains definitive proof of the validity of its particular position. Unfortunately, the proofs from the various sites prove opposing opinions. And even though there’s been considerable progress in the last decade or so in loosening the rule, there’s been very little agreement on a standard usage. Teachers, editors, and proofreaders still disagree. Grammatical experts disagree among themselves. Noted literary figures disagree—sometimes even with themselves. So, the onus still falls on the writer (and as it’s a particularly large onus, that can be pretty painful).

By the way, if you plan to take the “his/her” route, be careful. In formal writing, a lot of editors don’t like this construction. Even in informal writing, it can be taken as either laziness or lack of a clear understanding of grammar. If you have to go this way, at least use “his or her.” It’s still a waffle, but it shows that the reader has a choice. And please don’t use “his and her.” That only makes sense if you intend to indicate that there are two people.

Sorry to have to say this, but if you’ve read this far hoping I’d give you a definitive solution to the problem, you’re going to be disappointed. I don’t know the answer either, but I’ll tell you how I handle it. I do what the situation calls for. If the writing assignment is for someone who insists on strict adherence to “correct” usage, I use a singular pronoun—male or female as the sense of the sentence calls for—with an indefinite pronoun. If I’m writing for someone who wants the copy to read more like the way people speak, I use a plural form where it fits and a singular masculine or feminine pronoun where it makes the most sense. When I can get away with it, I avoid the problem and use a plural construction. When you’re writing for others to read, whether for pleasure or profit, it becomes a situation where everyone has to decide which course to take for (his, her, their, his/her, his or her) self (selves).