| Write What You Mean (June 2009) |
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After a sweltering hot day on the golf course, 17 UKAPMP golfers were joined by another 40 or so members to hear a light-hearted talk on writing what you mean, presented by Mark Jones, Editor-in-Chief at Cedar Communications and self-confessed plain English fanatic. Mark presented at the 2008 UKAPMP Conference and was a popular speaker so he made a welcome return. After some introductory examples of the contrasting styles of George W Bush and Barack Obama (not a fair contest really!), Mark reminded us that words and speech really do have power, citing the Pope’s speech in Poland in 1979 as one of the elements contributing to the fall of communism in 1989. Mark then gave us some hilarious re-workings of “the cat sat on the mat” as potentially written by people we regularly come across in our proposal world – lawyers, scientists and researchers – with each re-working extending to at least three lines long. We all had a good laugh, but his point was a serious one – look at your writing and ask yourself how complicated is it? How difficult are you making it for the reader? Is your punctuation, spelling and grammar an asset or a liability to clarity? He then threw a few examples of dangling modifiers, false comparatives and polysyllabic words at us, as well as his list of ‘bugbear’ words. Now, where was that number for the grammar course?
Emma Poole.
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