Think you don't need a writer involved in creating your marketing collateral? The people behind these three logos were clearly too interested in the design of the things to care about how they might read to an outsider.
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Firstly, thanks to everyone for putting forward your suggestions about why the sign in yesterday's post might annoy me.
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Can you see why I get annoyed every time I walk past this plaque? It's on a house not far from my office and I can see two things wrong with it.
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Why is it that when it comes to the English language many business folk seem to think that getting it wrong makes them sound impressive?
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Launching a new series of posts on bad copy inspired by bad science, I hereby present to you the first ever dental hygiene product to harness the power of string theory.
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Nice piece on linguistic inflation from the BBC website.
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Have you noticed that the word “education” has gone out of fashion? Yep, it’s been replaced by “learning” – that horrible, anaemic little word favoured by people who believe thinking is an elitist activity.
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More proof that those who run the country don't care about standards of literacy in the UK. The minister responsible for education (repeat: for education) has been criticised for having a blog rife with spelling mistakes.
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I'm all for rules – provided we know why we're following them. But slavish obedience to what you were taught at school reveals an uncritical mind.
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I can honestly say that I can think of no possible situation in which I would find the need to use the word “facilitate”. It’s got far too many syllables, for a start.
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I’m perfectly happy for you to use the word “impact”. If, that is, you’re writing a paper on ballistics, a police report about a car crash, or a summary of theories of how the dinosaurs were wiped out.
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A message to M&S in these bleak days for retail: fire the copywriter you pay to come up with all those silly descriptors.
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From hotels to hedge funds, it seems that everything is “boutique” these days. But let’s face it, "boutique" is just a euphemism for "small".
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Here’s something annoying that I’m spotting more and more often: journalists’ increasing use of the word “decline” when they mean “refuse”.
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The market for disingenuous financial euphemisms is booming. Simply take a positive-sounding word and simply precede it with a suffix such as “down”, “negative”, “sub” or “under”.
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Today I came across an example of writing where the most fundamental question in the reader’s mind was, very confusingly, left unanswered.
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Am I being too simplistic to think "falling prices" would have been a better way of putting it?
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The word “meritocracy” was originally pejorative, describing a dystopian world in which the elite use the idea of I.Q. + effort to maintain their position.
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You’d think no one truly interested in either culture or the arts would use the tautology "cultural arts". After all, the arts are a part of culture and culture includes a variety arts.
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It’s not enough that you’ve bored me rigid with that overused tailoring metaphor, “bespoke”. By pairing it with “customised”, you’re telling me you think I’m too dim to understand what you’re getting at.
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