It occurred to me that we might as well, at the same time, offer some help and pointers for people in business who are not PR specialists but find themselves involved in doing PR for their employer or their own business.

So please have a look at the info here and let me know if you’d like to reserve a place at either or both of these one-day workshops.

Image via Wikipedia

For the last week, inspired by Kyle Flaherty, I’ve endeavored to follow a ‘one app at a time’ policy. That means I have one application open on my desktop any one time.  The idea is to try to cut down the noise and be more productive.

So TweekDeck stayed open only when I was using it.  If I was writing, only Word remained on my desktop.

So one week later, how is the experiment going?

It was a lot harder to do than I expected.  In fact, I found it almost impossible not to have a browser open most of the time.  When writing, if I needed to look up a fact, up came the browser.  When sending an email and I realised I needed to include a link, up came the browser.

By the end of Day One I realised that it was pointless to close Firefox so I left it alone. However, overall I found the experience to be positive. I got an incredible amount of writing done.  I felt less stressed and more in control.

Key to this was email.  Previously I’d have kept an eye on email and read messages as they came in.  Then I’d have them in the back of mind the whole time until I was able to deal with them. Now, they are off my radar until I have time to respond or action emails.  It’s a bit of relief.

Some of my Tweeple were looking for me.  I had a few tweets asking where I am, but interestingly I gained more followers than usual this week, despite being significantly less active. That’s probably just a coincidence though.

So will I keep to the regime?  I’m certainly going to try, but it’s easy to slip into old habits.  You all will have to help me.

Image via Wikipedia

I was not shocked to read the headline City drops apostrophes from signs.

It just made me sad to read that the city of Birmingham, Britain’s second city, has decided not use the possesive apostrophe on signs in the future.  They say this decision will cut costs and avoid confusion.

Why am I sad? Because I love the English language!  I love its quirky rules and exceptions to those rules.  I love that everything is  not spelled phonetically.  I love that there are several meanings to some words, and several spellings to others.  This is  what makes English, well English.

On his blog, Birmingham City Councillor Martin Mullany says, “Many English language countries have made a national decision to drop the possessive apostrophe. The USA dropped theirs in 1890 and Australia in 2001.”

Yes, well they are not England are they?  And isn’t ENGlish actually the language of ENGland?

I understand that one of the great things about language is that it changes and grows and ‘morphs’ with society, but it seems to me that this is baby and bathwater.

I say, hold onto the quirky. Keep the nuance. Love what’s different.

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• Half of Brits abuse apostrophe’s (theregister.co.uk)
• Style Points: Public Editing (abbeville.wordpress.com)

Jeff Pulver is encouraging us to take part in Blogday 2008 and I figure why not?  It’s a great way for us all to check out different blogs and maybe learn a thing or two.  So here are my five blogs (non-PR)  to celebrate BlogDay.

1. Special Little People provides aromatherapy products for children. Blogger Janine Wood shares how she uses scents in her own life as a mother.  She has a nice writing style and reveals quite a bit about herself and her life.

2. I love reading Dan Santow’s blog Wordwise.  It’s chock full of expert information on writing style and grammar.  Everyone who reads or writes English should subscribe to Dan’s blog.

3. I’ve been following the Invincebelle blog for the past few months.  It’s an online community for women who live and work in a multicultural world. Its goal is to provide both personal and professional development for women who work.

4. I’ve been incredibly impressed with the Ramsey Daily Photo blog ever since I found it a couple months ago. This blog has an incredibly active community and showcases this photographer’s incredible creativity.

5. I’ve been following Rita’s Musings ever since she launched the blog a couple of years ago. There is no central theme. She doesn’t update often. But this blog gives a window into Rita’s world and me feel that I’m still connected to her even though I now live thousands of miles away and haven’t seen her in years.

Happy BlogDay 2008 everyone!

Recently returned from London two traumas affronted me: first, my daughter’s UFO broke, so had to be returned; second, and more importantly, when returning it to the store whence it came, Harrods, I realised the world’s most famous store has lost its apostrophe!

Diligently adding the apostrophe throughout the refund request letter, it was only on the website the apostrophe omission came into full and alarming view. Where – and why – has it gone?

The store was established in 1834 by Charles Henry Harrod, so it is his store and should therefore be Harrod’s. Apparently the apostrophe has been mislaid in fairly recently history and in 2006 the store was criticised by the Apostrophe Protection Society, along with Selfridges and Currys, for discarding the punctuation mark.  In an article on the subject The Times quoted John Richards, chairman and founder of the society, as saying: ‘Many corporations have started to drop the apostrophe arguing that it looks better that way.

‘It amounts to a deliberate corporate abuse of the English language and sets a very bad example to schoolchildren.’

It seems odd that the third most visited tourist attraction in London, arguably the world’s most famous store, with a commitment to excellence, should not complete its mission and add that little grammar mark. I thought it was striving to keep all of its customers happy …

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• Harrods Knightsbridge?

You have to admire him for coming up with such a bad suggestion with such conviction.
It was a bit like watching the Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf who gave a series of press conferences during the invastion of Iraq that have put him in the annals of least plausible comments in modern history. Remember when he said that US troops were not in Baghdad at the start of the Iraqi invasion, when we had all seen plenty of footage to the contrary.

Both Dr Smith and Minister Sahhaf provoke amused incredulity, with a touch of admiration, because they’re so wrong and yet prepared to broadcast their statements.

Professor Smith, who is senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University, said in an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement, that he’s ‘fed up’ with correcting his students’ ‘atrocious spelling’ so suggested certain words should be accepted as variants.

These words included: arguement, Febuary, ignor, ocurred, opertuniry, que, speach, thier, truely and twelth.
It ocurred to him (possibly on the twelth of Febuary) there was the opertunity to ignor truely bad spelling. He obviously couldn’t be ‘bovvered’ to correct them any more.

Naturally his proposal has provoked mainly negative feedback on the Times’ website. Good spelling demonstrates attention to detail, said Jon C and is the ‘hallmark of professionalism.’ Sloppy use betrays sloppy thinking.

Alex D said getting ‘thier’ right does matter and that there’s quite a difference between: ‘Let’s shoot there son’ and ‘Let’s shoot their son.’

How would the professor feel if the same relaxed standards were applied to criminology, asked another. You’ve almost got to admire the professor for this wholesale surrender to bad education.

Ironically, support for the proposal would probably not come from Sahhaf, who is now living in the United Arab Emirates (although he’d possibly deny that) because he has a masters degree in English literature from Baghdad university and was intent on becoming an English teacher before Saddam Hussein and Iraqi’s ‘arguement’ with the rest of the world interrupted/interupted.

This great number of mistakes prompted Paul Brians, English professor at Washington State University, to compile a whole book on the subject, the thick tome is entitled: ‘Common Errors in English Usage.’

Of all the mistakes that are made in the usage of English, one of the professor’s particular bugbears, (he said in an interview with Voice of America’s Wordmaster programme), is the inappropriate use of ‘at all’ at the end of a sentence. For example: ‘Do you want any help with that at all?’ The prof said when you stick ‘at all’ on the end of the sentence you are in fact suggesting you’re offering little help.

Personally, I use ‘at all’ frequently and mean it as a general offer of help suggesting: “I’ll offer in any way I can, but am not suggesting you can’t handle this by yourself.” The good news for me is, the prof says it’s more commonly used by young people … so it’s an indication of youth.

Apparently, doctors who spend three hours a week playing video games made 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery found researchers in 2004. You could be forgiven for fixating on the fact that they make any mistakes at all, never mind in over a third of cases! But this is used to illustrate the use of the word ‘fewer’, because had they used the word ‘less’ that would have been, for some sad folks, a far greater crime than the odd mistaken slash with a scalpel.

People are always mixing up less and fewer and it can be irritating. Less refers to a number in general and fewer is individual items. There is less traffic and fewer cars, for example.

Getting it wrong is another plague of modern life that is gathering force, by stealth, and is sweeping through supermarkets, books, newspapers, schools, boardrooms and into politicians’ mouths.

One clever blogger, Joshua Sarkis Prowse made his point so well (on Yoursinwriting.com – the emphasis is no doubt on ’sin’) his statement deserves to be quoted: ‘This feigned literacy has become the norm, and we should be taking the problem more seriously. It has pervaded all levels of business and government, to the shame and heartache of millions.

‘Don’t believe me? Two words: George Bush. And on that topic, here’s a bonus application of today’s lesson:
‘”Less Bush means fewer wars, which results in fewer deaths, and less sorrow.”‘

Apparently Grammarman was sent to planet Earth as a baby from his native planet that is populated by a quiet and gentle people called Librarians, a peace-loving folk who surround themselves with books and reference works. Grammarman’s mission was to take care of the English language and defend it from the enemies of grammar – Article Ants, Anna Gramme, The Interrupter, Uncle Uncountable and Sammy Colon. He is assisted by Alpha-bot (the world’s smartest android) and Syntax, a strange visitor from another galaxy.

The concept is great and it’s a pity only a select group of students of English are familiar with this battle against the growing scourge of grammar crimes.

Mr Boyd was interviewed about his creation on EnglishClub.com by a Josef Essberger. Good, interesting interview, until, horror, we came to ‘reference to comics of the 40’s and 50’s’. Why, oh why, the apostrophes?

Today, for example, I received this within an email. It was ‘a pleasant summers night.’ Pleasant the night may have been, but the lazy lack of apostrophe has ruined the picture painted and side tracked me from what the email was all about!

The night ‘belonged’ to summer, so requires an apostrophe. If it is plural: ‘In three days’ time’ it goes after the ’s’. The trouble with emails is, they illustrate so frequently how poor the standard of general grammar is. Even my spell check doesn’t pick up the fact it’s a mistake, so if people bothered to resort to that, it wouldn’t help.

It just isn’t good email etiquette to reply with a corrected version of the original, is it? Should this quest to lift the standards of grammar in general be so great to risk being rude? Does it matter that much, or would they just think I was showing off and should fixate on something important? What do you reckon?

Having spent a good hour reading about the differences between the two in an attempt to finally pin it down, I still don’t really get it.

photo credit: ckaroli

I understand that ‘affect’ is to pretend and that’s about it. But as far as I can tell, they both mean to influence, to act upon, to bring about.

Take this sentence, and this is correct: ‘TV has a strong effect on public opinion, my mood can affect my thinking too.’ I just can’t see the difference!

It doesn’t help that the description of what ‘affect’ means includes the word ‘effect’. Affect: ‘To influence or effect on’.

I feel slightly better knowing that confusing the two goes back to at least 1484, according to one website. I also felt slightly better knowing that I’m not the poor schmuck whose job, nay life, it is to establish such facts. At least I have only lost one hour so far to this quest!

If anyone has any fail safe tips to iron out this wrinkle, please help. Failing that, my solution is to use other words – influence is a good one – and see if that has any affect/effect.