You've misspelled a client's name in your newest project proposal. The presentation you spent hours perfecting still contains multiple typos your brain skipped over. Your website is full of outdated or incorrect information.

The thing about mistakes is you don't know you've made them until— well, until you know you've made them.  Chances are typos and misinformation occur in your business documents more often than you realize. Your most forgiving readers may wonder about the quality of your work. The least forgiving will just move on to a competitor. 

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From The Hill's Blog Briefing Room:

Someone might want to look into whether an impostor took President Obama's place during his trip to Russia.

In a release touting an agreement between Obama and President Dmitry Medvedev over how to craft a follow-up to the START arms reduction treaty, the White House claimed the document had been signed by one "Barak Obama."

Whoops:

Looks like Barack Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, needs to be sure all the President's proofreaders aren't on summer vacation.  Give us a call if you need backup, Rahm. Our same-day turnaround means your documents will be polished and ready before tomorrow morning's national security meeting.

As for the rest of you, you may not be the most powerful man on earth, but we can still provide you with error-free documents in time for tomorrow morning's meeting.  Contact us today.

Related: Little Errors, Big Mistakes and Conclusive Evidence on the Need for Proofreaders

How can you get writer’s block if you aren’t even a writer? 

In the information age, anybody’s job description can include some kind of writing. That means anybody can suffer from writer’s block or any other kind of creative block. 

Deadline is approaching. You have to be cunning, creative, even brilliant. But after a half hour of staring at the screen, the ideas just aren’t coming. What can you do?  

While writers may have given us all their disease, they’ve also given us a few mental plungers that can clear out the creative pipelines.

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Grammar Girl predicts the new iPod touch ad campaign may give the incorrect but often-used "funnest" (as opposed to "most fun") the credibility it needs to cross over into acceptable, albeit informal, usage within the English language.  Her detailed examination of the subject and an overview of the debate on whether "fun" is acceptable as an adjective is here. (Most people born after 1970 have no problem with "fun" as an adjective, which is probably how "funner" and "funnest" snuck in to begin with.) 

There are plenty of examples of companies and their products influencing our everyday language. It was two years ago that "google" joined "xerox" as a legitimate verb, recognized by both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster. Band-Aid, Kleenex, and Aspirin (among others) have all been genericised. But in the case of the iPod touch campaign, we aren't talking about the acceptance of a new word as much as the fact that Steve Jobs may have just announced the verdict in a controversial grammar debate.

And Bloomberg News thought he was dead.

What other examples of a company's impact on language come to mind?

Hat tip to Mighty Red Pen.

Huh?

Okay, so that’s not really what I mean. What I am referring to is a great tip I ran across today at the Business Writing Blog. The article was titled "Make It Big (to Proofread)" and offered a simple, painless way to get better results when proofreading your documents.

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and if you sit down with someone who is a visionary and ask them what they do, that’s probably about how many words you’ll get. Entrepreneurs and other visionaries are nothing else if not passionate, and given a listening ear, they can go into elaborate detail about the new frontiers and new worlds they envision. But if you are communicating your business or ministry vision using a thousand or more words, only the most patient will stay along for the ride. Simplifying your message and making it transferable is the key to your success.  (more…)