Good English - It's not rocket science

I've mentioned before that I work for a media relations firm who wishes to remain anonymous on its employees' blogs, and I'll respect its wishes for the moment. There's no point in potentially stoking its paranoid fantasies of worker sabotage or industrial spying - not yet (heh, heh, heh).

Sometimes, however, I must report on things that happen around the office that strike me. A case in point happened last week when I was prepping a press release and came across the following:

"The company is well funded, and confident to have the financial support needed to achieve the established goals to move forward in the execution of the company's business plan."

Technically it is a sentence but aesthetically it's a Frankenstein monster of enormous proportions and should never have been allowed to see the light of day (unfortunately, I'm a glorified proof-reader and couldn't make the changes I longed to effect so it was distributed as is).

If I were a "real" editor, this is how I would have fixed the poor thing:

"The company is well funded, and is confident that it has the financial support needed to execute its business plan."

Is is Shakespeare? Does it even reach the level of Stephen King on a good day? Well, no, but it's certainly more readable and (dare I say) more exciting than the original. For one thing, I've eliminated 4 of the 5 prepositions that slowed things down. And I've made the verbs as active as they could be (sadly most of them were forms of "to be").

At any rate, the point is that it took me less than a minute to dramatically improve the readability and impact of an otherwise unreadable sentence, and it's an example of the worst part of my job - reading crap like this day in and day out. There's not much about my job I would want to change but the writing competence of our clients is certainly up there.

Book Review: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

Just wanted to strongly recommend John McWhorter's latest book, a slim volume for the general reader interested in language called Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.

In five chapters, McWhorter looks at some of the more interesting aspects of English -

Chapter 1 - Explains why English has the "meaningless do" and uses the present participle (-ing) as a marker for the present tense (it's the Celts' fault).

Chapter 2 - Looks at the arbitrariness of grammar and how English's evolved.

Chapter 3 - Explains the reason why English is astonishingly lacking in case endings (compared to its Indo-European cousins) (blame the Vikings for this one).

Chapter 4 - Demolishes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that grammar significantly shapes a speaker's view of reality.

Chapter 5 - Discusses the exciting hypothesis that proto-German's sound shift from "p", "t" and "k" to "f", "th" and "h" is the result of Semitic influence from the mid-first millennium BC (the Phoenicians can claim this one).

Overall, a very satisfying and quick (c. 200 pages) read.