Noun string are, as you might suppose, a series of nouns. Here’s one:

competitive price options

That’s easy to understand. The nouns competitive and price serve as adjectives to modify options.

Deciphering noun strings gets tougher with each noun you toss into the string.

Alternative regulated competitive price options

Postoperative recuperation program procedure indicator sheet

In a noun string, the writer uses a series of nouns as adjectives to modify the final noun. That’s what makes a noun string tough to read: At each noun the reader hesitates, wondering if he should understand this as a noun or as a …

You take care to send email messages that are grammatically correct and well formatted. But did you know that what you send isn’t always what your recipient sees? In some cases, what you send can deliver a different impression than you intended.
GMail
Here’s a message I wrote up in my Gmail account and sent to myself (to three of my other email addresses).  The photo I attached is of my collie, the smiling Archee McLeash.

Yahoo!
My GMail-generated email landed in my Yahoo! email account with the photo up top. The whole email looked like …

I heard the clerk say “May I help the next guest?” as I stood in line at Joann’s last Sunday. I was fifth in line, so I had some time to ponder his word choice: Guest. Aren’t I a customer?

Today, in line for coffee, I heard the same question, “May I help the next guest?”

To that, I replied (silently), You can sell me a cup of coffee. But if you plan to have me pay for it, let’s not pretend I’m your guest.

If you are in business—especially if you have a retail establishment at which people purchase your product or …

Your marketing writing doesn’t need to be all sell, sell, sell.  Your writing can speak to your customers pre-sale and then post-sale.

I’ve mentioned before the differences between marketing writing and technical writing. You can use both on your web site, in your newsletters, and in various communications to customers and potential customers.
Think “Post-Sale”
After you sell your product or service to a customer—the work was performed and paid for—he still needs to hear from you.

Depending on your business, your customer needs instructions or opinion. If you sell garage door openers, provide installation and how-to-use instructions. If you sell mortgages or cosmetic …

Football. The word is universally understood. Even in the States, to see the word spelled futbol,  is to see a little soccer video in one’s mind’s eye.

The Stanley Cup games finished up last week, so I turned to the FIFA World Cup for new sports action. I love a good game!  I don’t know much about soccer—obviously, the basics are easy to grasp—but two years ago, I didn’t know much about hockey. I relied on sports-savvy fans to tutor me in the finer points of the sport.

Even when we speak different languages, we speak. We humans are extraordinarily equipped to …

Here is a writing tip:  Don’t rely on your cell phone in an emergency. Write down phone numbers and carry them with you.

I was in a car accident two weeks ago. Crunchy, smashy 6-car pile up on 101-south bound near SFO.  It was just like in the movies—tires squealing, horns blaring, horrible metal-on-metal bang and clang—except that, unlike the movies, I was actually in one of the cars.

After the thudding and praying stopped, and my traveling companion and I realized neither of us were badly hurt, we reached for our phones.  When I called another friend to come help us, …