Friday fun with lame punctuation humor
Happy Friday!
Similar Posts
Feds make better grades in 2015
The Center for Plain Language recently released final grades for US federal agencies. After completing a rigorous evaluation process, they concluded that Participation by agencies in the Center for Plain Language Federal Plain Language Report Card reached an all-time high: 23 agencies submitted materials for review, including all 15 Cabinet-level departments. Compliance scores increased overall: Eight…
Enjoy some cod English today
This post has nothing to do with writing in the workplace. But I discovered the Inky Fool not long ago. An entertaining site for those who love language. You’ll find a post by Mark Forsyth on Cod English that includes the delightful video below, which is credited to an Italian entertainer named Adriano Celentano. I assume…
How to write like a (wo)man at work
Thanks to Linguistics Research Digest for pointing me toward a recent study showing that men and women use different writing styles (word choices and sentence structures). This is significant for a couple of reasons. First, the differences have been documented in speech rather than writing prior to this research. Second, and most importantly, the female…
Forbes on learning to write for the workplace in college
I just read a Forbes piece from a while back that’s worth a minute: Why Trying to Learn Clear Writing in College is Like Trying to Learn Sobriety in a Bar. Writing education in the US does not empower our students. They are not encouraged to write in a way that communicates to workplace readers….
Friday fun with emoji
I’m a couple of days late with this nod to April Fool’s Day fun. The folks at Google Chrome helped us celebrate with this tongue-in-cheek video about emoji, which the Oxford Dictionaries say originated in the 1990s from Japanese: e ‘picture’ + moji ‘letter, character’. Believe it or not. Moby Dick has actually been translated into…
What’s the difference between “defective” and “does not perform to design”?
In case you missed it, you really should watch John Oliver making fun of GM‘s attempts to control the language of those discussing their millions of defective (in their prescribed words, “does not perform to design”) vehicles. Last week, USA Today picked up on the Detroit Free Press piece titled GM’s banned words: What’s wrong with using…
