Are you planning on sending holiday greetings to your clients and colleagues? Here are some thoughts to keep in mind:
Plan ahead. “Ahead” as in right now.
It takes time to prepare and send a holiday greeting, and the deadlines are drawing nigh. You’ve got to:

• Make a list and check it twice (because you might want to differentiate who-gets-what).
• Write a suitable message (or more than one message).
• Choose stationary if your plan to use postal mail.
• Choose a suitable email template if you plan to email.
• Allow time to format your message, including sending yourself a  test message to make sure it looks spruce.

Pick a …

When you write up your postings for whatever social media networking sites you frequent, please consider:
Rules apply.
Grammar, spelling, and sentence structure all matter. How closely you wish to follow these rules depends on the image you wish to convey. Or, to say that the other way around, however you express yourself will convey an image. If you want to appear at all professional, stick to good grammar, correct spelling and as few exclamation points as possible.
Be consistent with personal pronouns.
You can use I or you can use we. Just pick one and stick with it. Let’s say your Facebook page …

O fabulous day! The SF Giants won the World Series!

No, they did not defeat every team in the whole wide world. So why is it the World Series? After all, professional baseball is played in dozens of countries.  The sport is immensely popular in Japan and throughout Central and South America. And although Major League Baseball’s teams are from both the US and Canada, and those teams field players of various nationalities, the competition is obviously limited to North America.

Is it fair to call the championship a World Series?

Watching Wednesday’s victory parade in San Francisco, I contemplated this question and …

This just in: You are fallible!

Based on a scrupulously scientific study I conducted on everyone I have known for more than six months, 102% of them have failed at perfection in either speech, writing or good taste.

Embrace your ineptitude! Strive for adequacy!

As a reformed perfectionist, I follow General Patton’s advice: A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution applied ten minutes later.
The path toward perfection is a trail of tears
You aren’t perfect and you never will be. Stop trying.

You can be excellent. You can even be exceptional. Even though you are very good at some …

Ah, September! The season of Back to School. Me, I’m always back to school, relying on books and web sites to teach me what I don’t know, whether it’s what I haven’t learned yet, what I didn’t learn the first time around, or what I forgot since last week.

In the spirit of life-long learning, let me share with you my two favorite web sites from halls of higher learning.
Purdue OWL
I turn to the OWL when I want to dig deep and learn more about some aspect of writing.

The acronym O W L (apart from being a metaphor for …

It’s September, soon to be October and, ever interested in words, I again note the oddity that the root of September means seventh, October means eighth, November ninth and December tenth. Do the math: September isn’t the seventh month, nor is October the eight.

What other words do we use daily that no longer mean what they meant?
Congratulations, that’s so awful.
London’s St Paul’s Cathedral was built out of the ashes of the 1666 Great Fire. It’s said (perhaps apocryphally) that this masterpiece was described as awful, artificial and amusing. In those days, amusing meant amazing, awful meant awe-inspiring and artificial meant …

I’ve been recommending Mark Twain’s treatise “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” for years now. Read it! You’ll learn a lot about writing, and you’ll enjoy a few laughs.

Here are Twain’s points 12-18, with my own comments beneath. He says that these “little rules” require that the author shall:

Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

When you merely come near to it, your reader might be confused. Worse, your reader might not be confused; he might accept as true what you don’t mean.

If you mean to say “Wednesday at 3:00″ don’t say …

People regularly confuse I with me,  or confuse me with I. Who among us stops to think, “Am I using this first person pronoun in the subjective case or the objective?”

But there are simple ways to remember how to use first person pronouns correctly.
First Person Technical
In case you’re interested, here are the technical details:

• Use I in the subjective case; as the subject of the sentence. “I ate ossobuco.”
• Use Me in the objective case; as the object of the verb. “That pesky armadillo chased me down the canyon.”
• Use Myself in the reflexive case;  following the noun that refers …
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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 …

When I begin editing a client’s draft, I invariably find these two duos of confusion:

Since used to mean because

Like used to mean such as

Let’s look at each of these pairs of confusion.
Since or Because?

• Since refers to time:

It’s been years since I’ve eaten s’mores!

• Because refers to consequence:

I avoid s’mores because of my marshmallow allergy.

Oh, yes, it does make a difference.

Look at these two nearly-identical sentences about Rafe’s love life. Changing just one word changes the sentence’s meaning.

Since he broke up with flaxen-haired Dominique, Rafe’s dated brunettes.

…