Thursday, 28 June 2007
Lack of grammatical knowledge is a sackable offence.
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An email that passed through my inbox yesterday (all names and incriminating nouns have been changed):
Afternoon All,The errors in this pile of donkey-do stack up more quickly than Dane Bowers' plate at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. Let's have a quick run-through, although obviously I don't have time to pick through every stylistic and technical error.
Customer Service - thank-you all for attending the Microsoft Training, everyone has now completed and I have thanked Chris for providing the tours on your behalf.
Hopefully you all learned a few things that will benefit the customer's & your own knowledge.
Thanks,
Jane
Afternoon All,What's this? It's pathetic. Notice how, by capitalising the 'All', the author attempts to half-heartedly formalise the ineloquent, faux-informal 'Afternoon'. What sort of afternoon? The tone, usage and context of this are totally wrong.
Customer Service - thank-you all for attending the Microsoft TrainingWhy construct the sentence with the addressee at the beginning? And since when has 'thank you' (or the acceptable 'thankyou') been hyphenated? If the author had a decent grasp of written English, she could have rescued this sentence's oddball structure - possibly even making its unusualness appealing. But she couldn't.
everyone has now completedWhat? Completed what? This sounds like some sort of pseudo science-fiction terminology; in fact, it wouldn't seem out of place at a Scientology conference.
benefit the customer's &The coup de grâce. The incorrect apostrophe is good, but the incongruous ampersand is even better.
posted by Tom at 9:23 am
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9 Comments:
Utterly deplorable. Were I able, I would remove her e-mail account. Bet she was from Yaaahkshure.
Let's not go overboard. Emails (email is now officially a word - hyphen optional), even work emails aren't the most formal of publications. Jane's prose wasn't very pretty but the message was clear. "Afternoon" is no more arbitrary than "Good Afternoon" and is an acceptable spoken greeting; maybe an apostrophe would be useful to signify the missing "Good".
As for the capitalisation of "all"... it's not correct but I'm in a leniant mood so I guess we could let it slide.
However, for the crime of using an apostophe in a plural, I hereby issue a GrammarBlog fatwa: hunt this "Jane" down and burn her!
Agreed that there's nothing wrong with 'Afternoon All' per se, but when combined with the rest of her piffle it just got on my nerves.
While 'email' is a recognised word, I still feel compelled to use the hyphenated spelling. I'm odd like that.
The hyphen is perfectly acceptable Paul, don't you worry. In fact most sticklers would insist on it. I don't if I've mentioned this before but I'm kind of a maverick. Imagine MacGyver crossed with the Fonz... but into grammar.
I don't see why "even work emails aren't the most formal of publications".
This is because:
(a) I believe all written English should be respected and carved beautifully whether with quill or keyboard.
(b) From an employment law view- point, emails/Emails/e-mails/E-mails are treated in exactly the same way as letters: once it is written and sent it might as well be inked on to finest parchment scraped from the skin of a fetid hog and delivered post haste in a golden carriage. Thus, if we apply correct rules to a paper letter, so should we an electronic one.
Consider yourself told, so-called 'Gez'.
Legal Implications
- Potential legal problems mean clarity is very important in work emails.
- The flow and grace of the prose becomes secondary.
- Speed of reply is also a factor to consider.
- Am I simply being devils advocate?
- I am annoyed that I cant use < ul > and < u > tags in comments
- That is all
- Goodbye
I hope you can finish up soon. I admire your enthusiasm though.
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