I have a dilemma.
How much ‘business’ writing do we undertake? As a sales professional, I write cold emails, warm emails, engage in several email exchanges; I write responses to invitation to tenders, proposals, PowerPoint presentations, internal memos, scribbles on whiteboards and flip charts… exhausted?
Balancing the scales: professional and creative writing
I’m not exhausted at all as this all blends easily into my day job and then spills over into my personal emails, texts, WhatsApp IMs and Insta posts; I’ll add to this too that I’m a ‘creative writer’ – mostly short stories and half a novel but I do feel completely immersed in the written word for much of my life so… what’s the dilemma?
I have a reputation – hard-earned, believe me – of being a grammar and spelling fascist and I genuinely encounter wide-ranging reactions to this on a spectrum of eye-rolling, ‘give it a rest KT’ to ‘whoops, well spotted’!
To jar or not to jar: The impact of punctuation
My issue is always if the recipient of the missive is a pedant like me, grocers’ apostrophes, the Oxford comma and not knowing the difference between being a dependant and being dependent etc. will ‘jar’. Your reader may be completely alienated, or will they? Does it really matter if the message is conveyed well and received in the spirit it was delivered; does an erroneous apostrophe really hurt?
Maybe it’s old-fashioned to care; we consume information at such a rapid pace that minor grammatical mishaps can be ignored and won’t impact the absorption process but… I recall working some years ago with a colleague who was dyslexic and if he was sending an important email to a client, he would always ask me to double-check it and offer suggestions for changing. It was important enough to him to ‘get it right’.
To add greater weight to any discussion, I work in tech but sell products/services into the Education sector, meeting people in teaching through to execs running MATs so what message would I send to them if my written information jarred? Our extensive portfolio includes an award-winning curriculum learning product that offers teaching/learning support for 30+ subjects – including English Language and one element of its content is ‘basic punctuation’ so this clearly matters in modern teaching.
Would love to hear your thoughts…?