Alternatives to dehumanizing business ja...

It’s January, and for many of us it’s time to complete our annual self-assessments and undergo another round of performance reviews. No matter how good a writer you are or how adept you are at crafting messages, it’s never easy to complete a self-assessment. Choose the wrong words, and you might not get a raise. If only executives thought so carefully about words—particularly the words they use to describe the people who work for them. We’ve all been on the receiving end of a message that made us feel less like a human being and more like a replaceable part in...

And the award for best word goes to . . ...

January marks the culmination of “word awards season”—when dictionary publishers announce their selections for their words of the year. For 2013, Oxford University Press named selfie; Merriam-Webster named science; and Dictionary.com named privacy. There is another organization that names a word of the year—an organization you may have never heard of. This 125-year-old organization unites word nerds of all types and was naming a word of the year before it was cool—the American Dialect Society. For 2013, the society chose because as its word of the year. Not the...

Don’t skimp on content

As an avid reader of PR Daily and a believer in the value of content marketing, I am always on the lookout for sites that do a great job with their content. These sites give visitors the information they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible. Then there are the sites that don’t do it so well. I recently visited a physician’s website, and on the page titled “Insurance” was the following text: “We accept most insurance health plans. There are too many to list. Contact us at [phone number] for assistance.” No, no, no. A thousand times no! There are...

There’s a word for that?

The English language never ceases to amaze me. Considering that there are an estimated 250,000 distinct English words—and that the average, college-educated American has a vocabulary of 60,000 words—there are tens of thousands of “undiscovered” words. Let’s explore this untapped lexicon by looking at a few words that will make you say, “There’s a word for that?” (Definitions from Wordnik.com and Oxford Dictionaries Online.) Coronis—the curved line or flourish at the end of a book or chapter. Deipnosophist—a person skilled at conversation during...

19 math terms for PR professionals

People, with good reason, hate stereotypes about their professions. A recent post on PR Daily described some of the most annoying generalizations about PR professionals. One that was left off the list: PR pros (and writers and editors) are bad at math. I wouldn’t say we’re bad at math; maybe it’s that we don’t like math. After all, we went to school to learn how to write and edit, not solve differential equations. The one math course I took for my undergraduate degree in journalism was called “Math: Its Spirit and Use.” So I get it: Math is not for everyone. It...

Heading off hyphenation headaches

Hyphenation rules can be exceedingly complicated, complex, and crazy making. (For example, does “crazy making” need a hyphen?) I recently spent 30 minutes explaining to a colleague why “follow up” is hyphenated in some instances, but not others. In general, we use hyphens to avoid ambiguity. Otherwise, how would we be able to tell the difference between a “man-eating shark” and a “man eating shark”? A definitive collection of hyphenation rules does not exist; rather, different style manuals prescribe different usage guidelines. In the style guide that I use...