October, 2014
Got a book in you? No time or inclination to write it yourself? Need help putting it in print, putting your ideas into words? Perhaps that next book is your way to make your own ends meet, and better.
Precise language and sustained focus are natural byproducts of economic work. Put those byproducts to work for you by letting me help you ghostwrite that project.
Got a book in you? No time or inclination to write it yourself? Need help putting it in print, putting your ideas into words? Perhaps that next book is your way to make your own ends meet, and better.
Precise language and sustained focus are natural byproducts of economic work. Put those byproducts to work for you by letting me help you ghostwrite that project.
Proofreading:
The Importance of Impeccable Writing
The Importance of Impeccable Writing
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"People judge you by the words you use." - Verbal Advantage
This slogan, coined by the well-known vocabulary program Verbal Advantage, pertains also to grammar, punctuation and spelling. Alas! For reasons too numerous to list here, many otherwise good, competent, talented people lose inestimable opportunities because they're silently judged for their written mistakes - especially lately, due to the popularity of social networking and text messaging. We seem to have arrived at the odd paradox of being more dependent than ever on written communication, at the same time that we're less prepared than ever to do it well. Confusion, especially about subjects and objects (see below), apostrophes and homophones, is reaching epidemic proportions. (For further discussion about this, please see the Benefits Manual, pages 31-33.) |
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You may ask, "So what? They know what I mean."
That may be so; but if you are composing a sales message in a business plan, a marketing plan, a web page, or in email or social media campaigns, remember that you are competing with others who may compose their sales messages more carefully than you compose yours.
The message itself demonstrates your attention to detail. It "says" something about you.
Therefore, in answer to your question, I would offer another question: if you don't even care about the seemingly insignificant details of language, why should I trust you with more significant details by hiring you?
If you lack the discernment to know how or when to use an apostrophe in a sentence, why should I trust you to have the discernment to know how to use anything else, like a wrench on my car, a saw on my house, food for my children, or care for my aging parents? Sloppy writing says, "I am incompetent, and I don't care."
Answer: I shouldn't trust you. Discernment is discernment, and caring is caring - regardless whether they're about language, automotive or household repair, child care, or elder care.
This is why impeccable writing is imperative.
Are you a good, competent, talented person who, for whatever reason, suffers from this confusion epidemic?
Stand out from the crowd!
Get help making your messages impeccable.
That may be so; but if you are composing a sales message in a business plan, a marketing plan, a web page, or in email or social media campaigns, remember that you are competing with others who may compose their sales messages more carefully than you compose yours.
The message itself demonstrates your attention to detail. It "says" something about you.
Therefore, in answer to your question, I would offer another question: if you don't even care about the seemingly insignificant details of language, why should I trust you with more significant details by hiring you?
If you lack the discernment to know how or when to use an apostrophe in a sentence, why should I trust you to have the discernment to know how to use anything else, like a wrench on my car, a saw on my house, food for my children, or care for my aging parents? Sloppy writing says, "I am incompetent, and I don't care."
Answer: I shouldn't trust you. Discernment is discernment, and caring is caring - regardless whether they're about language, automotive or household repair, child care, or elder care.
This is why impeccable writing is imperative.
Are you a good, competent, talented person who, for whatever reason, suffers from this confusion epidemic?
Stand out from the crowd!
Get help making your messages impeccable.
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My Dog is Learning Grammar
My dog is learning grammar: Each time he goes to pee, The silly critter thinks that He’s the one who’s walking me. I correct him and instruct him how Despite his silly grin, I’m the subject; he’s the object; I’m the one who’s walking him. And so, he learns the lesson, Each time we leave the room. I think he’s finally learning about Who is walking whom. He gets it, and he follows; I don’t think that he’s bitter . . . . Now he knows his grammar better than Folks at LinkedIn and Twitter. |
Subject - Verb - Object: the most simple sentence structure. Dog bites boy. I write this. You read it.
Have you ever felt perplexed, helpless, hopeless, or powerless? I find that these feelings are the greatest reasons why people are reluctant to engage with me and accept my free Lifetime Savings Plan offer. They feel like passive, powerless objects, victims of circumstance for whom any serious planning is an exercise in futility.
To surmount this obstacle, to overcome this often unspoken objection, I've composed the following discourse. I hope you find it enlightening and encouraging, and that it will inspire you to engage, and accept my offer.
Have you ever felt perplexed, helpless, hopeless, or powerless? I find that these feelings are the greatest reasons why people are reluctant to engage with me and accept my free Lifetime Savings Plan offer. They feel like passive, powerless objects, victims of circumstance for whom any serious planning is an exercise in futility.
To surmount this obstacle, to overcome this often unspoken objection, I've composed the following discourse. I hope you find it enlightening and encouraging, and that it will inspire you to engage, and accept my offer.
Have you ever been in a complex, confusing, interdependent, and perhaps even codependent relationship or situation, in which it was very difficult to understand what was going on, and how you should deal with it . . . a toxic, dysfunctional blame-game, in which everyone is pointing the finger at everyone else, nobody owns up, and nothing gets done?
Who did it? Who did what, to whom? If it's favorable, who gets the glory? If it's not, who gets the blame? All of these questions are easily answerable when we're clear about subjects and objects.
In my life, I have found that those who confuse grammatical subjects and objects also make disastrous life mistakes, like confusing:
In schools, there has been a profound lack of clarity about this for a very long time. I've met teachers who routinely muddle their subjects and objects, and I'm sure you have, too.
If teachers don't get it right, what hope do students have? Why is this happening?
Because Economics is about understanding forces of cause and effect, I wonder a lot about this - probably too much. One possible answer that occurs to me is how, by suggesting that objects can attract subjects - the nail attracts the hammer - popular 20th century New Thought and the Law of Attraction and Chaos Theory obscured simple, classic, linear notions of cause and effect
By acknowledging the interactive, interdependent nature of living, mutually respectful relationships, perhaps unintentionally, these theories confounded the subject/object distinction. Now this muddle is manifest in common jargon. Otherwise smart, educated people aren't sure about the differences between I and me, she and her, he and him, etc.
This interaction, both speaking and listening, writing and reading, acting and reacting, is also what defines the modern sales environment. The best salespeople are good listeners who, while listening actively, also keep a firm grip on the initiative. (For more about good salespeople, please see page 26 in the Benefits Manual.)
Especially considering the rapid interactions that happen now in social media, this is why I'm firmly convinced that, by using the right pronouns, it's so important to be clear both with ourselves and with others about which role we're playing.
For example when we post on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, we are acting. We are the subjects. When we're reading others' posts, we're reacting. We are the objects.
Who did it? Who did what, to whom? If it's favorable, who gets the glory? If it's not, who gets the blame? All of these questions are easily answerable when we're clear about subjects and objects.
In my life, I have found that those who confuse grammatical subjects and objects also make disastrous life mistakes, like confusing:
- perpetrator and victim,
- plaintiff and defendant,
- petitioner and respondent,
- east and west, and
- right and left.
In schools, there has been a profound lack of clarity about this for a very long time. I've met teachers who routinely muddle their subjects and objects, and I'm sure you have, too.
If teachers don't get it right, what hope do students have? Why is this happening?
Because Economics is about understanding forces of cause and effect, I wonder a lot about this - probably too much. One possible answer that occurs to me is how, by suggesting that objects can attract subjects - the nail attracts the hammer - popular 20th century New Thought and the Law of Attraction and Chaos Theory obscured simple, classic, linear notions of cause and effect
By acknowledging the interactive, interdependent nature of living, mutually respectful relationships, perhaps unintentionally, these theories confounded the subject/object distinction. Now this muddle is manifest in common jargon. Otherwise smart, educated people aren't sure about the differences between I and me, she and her, he and him, etc.
This interaction, both speaking and listening, writing and reading, acting and reacting, is also what defines the modern sales environment. The best salespeople are good listeners who, while listening actively, also keep a firm grip on the initiative. (For more about good salespeople, please see page 26 in the Benefits Manual.)
Especially considering the rapid interactions that happen now in social media, this is why I'm firmly convinced that, by using the right pronouns, it's so important to be clear both with ourselves and with others about which role we're playing.
For example when we post on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, we are acting. We are the subjects. When we're reading others' posts, we're reacting. We are the objects.
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But social media themselves - the very places where we interact - have become corrupted by this confusion. Incorrect pronouns are built into them, exacerbating it. At left, as you can see, both Twitter and LinkedIn make the mistake of using the subject form "who" instead of the object form "whom."
Of course, they do this to avoid "sounding" archaic. Pragmatically, their priority is to identify with and engage their users, so they use common everyday language that won't alienate them. This much is obvious. What isn't so obvious, however, is how in so doing, they help wreck the subject/object distinction that is so vital in effective social networking use. Subjects use it to achieve constructive goals, like building a profitable business. Objects browse, react, consume, and waste a lot of time and opportunity. Subjects produce. Objects consume. Subjects focus. Objects wander. When you consider how popular social networking has become and ponder the state of the economy and the opportunity costs of behaving like an object in social media, I hope you can see why in one's approach, it's so important to maintain the subject/object distinction and be a subject. As I ponder the opportunity cost of aimlessness, I realize it's quite literally a matter of survival. Unfortunately, by wrecking the distinction in their own content, the providers themselves don't help us. All they care about is that they have users, views, and clicks. To save ourselves from the peril of aimless wandering and otherwise enjoy real success, we have to help ourselves. |
Another obvious possibile cause of subject/object confusion is the ambivalence we all feel about glory and blame: we want the one, and not the other. If the news is good, we want to be the subject, and get credit for it. But if the news is bad, we want to be the object and distance ourselves from it - find a scapegoat, blame somebody else, be the innocent hapless victim, disappear and hide.
In the military we called it "fear of reprisal." Very rare is the individual who without hesitation, prevarication, or dissembling, promptly and bravely steps up, owns up, and admits guilt.
We use double standards. We're inconsistent, unprincipled, and dodgy.
In the military we called it "fear of reprisal." Very rare is the individual who without hesitation, prevarication, or dissembling, promptly and bravely steps up, owns up, and admits guilt.
We use double standards. We're inconsistent, unprincipled, and dodgy.
Partiality comes at a high price. This dodgy, disingenuous "blame game" is madness because it clouds, even wrecks, our minds.
It's a kind of mental self-abuse: by applying principles selectively, we become disoriented. We get lost. By dissolving our discernment, we become dissolute. We hurt ourselves by dissolving our clarity of thought and, in turn, our language, to such an extent that the confusion is now firmly established in minds that in most other respects are highly sophisticated and trained.
That is why it's called "corruption." It rots the mind. It is like warping a ruler or ruining a knife. Through inconsistency motivated by partiality, we lose our tools.
Now we find a lot of people across an amazingly wide educational spectrum, including Ph.D. level professionals, who aren't sure when to use "he" or "him" . . . never mind "whom", which, even though its descriptive purpose is just as vital as any other object form pronoun like me, him, her, them, or us, has now fallen into such disuse that it "sounds" archaic, and is understood as "a made-up word used by teachers to trick students." (For a little comic relief about this, see the following video from the award-winning comedy series, "The Office.")
It's a kind of mental self-abuse: by applying principles selectively, we become disoriented. We get lost. By dissolving our discernment, we become dissolute. We hurt ourselves by dissolving our clarity of thought and, in turn, our language, to such an extent that the confusion is now firmly established in minds that in most other respects are highly sophisticated and trained.
That is why it's called "corruption." It rots the mind. It is like warping a ruler or ruining a knife. Through inconsistency motivated by partiality, we lose our tools.
Now we find a lot of people across an amazingly wide educational spectrum, including Ph.D. level professionals, who aren't sure when to use "he" or "him" . . . never mind "whom", which, even though its descriptive purpose is just as vital as any other object form pronoun like me, him, her, them, or us, has now fallen into such disuse that it "sounds" archaic, and is understood as "a made-up word used by teachers to trick students." (For a little comic relief about this, see the following video from the award-winning comedy series, "The Office.")
Remedies? Courage; honesty; a little basic grammar instruction; and most importantly, positive, written goals, which I stand ready to help you work out, free of charge in your Lifetime Savings Plan.
Having positive written goals provides the "track" that can mitigate distraction. They define it: anything that doesn't help you reach your goals is, by definition, a distraction. Without goals, distractions are impossible to identify. With goals, distractions become obvious and easy to remedy.
How does any of this matter? It matters in the same way that working safely with electricity or fire matters: it's about noticing, understanding, and working with power.
Since subjects have power and objects don't, if one is unclear in one's mind and language about the difference, then one is confused about power, about life's drivers. On the other hand, if one is clear, it become possible to work with electricity without getting shocked, and fire without getting burned.
Clarity about subjects and objects can help untangle complex inter- and co-dependencies, understand agency, free will, volition, and incentives. It can reveal causes and drivers, resolve confusion and conflict, solve problems, correct mistakes, convey gratitude, give credit, assign praise, and promote, encourage, and reward excellence.
That is the advantage. That is how it matters.
Would you like a little help working safely with power? Please reach out. Thanks!
Having positive written goals provides the "track" that can mitigate distraction. They define it: anything that doesn't help you reach your goals is, by definition, a distraction. Without goals, distractions are impossible to identify. With goals, distractions become obvious and easy to remedy.
How does any of this matter? It matters in the same way that working safely with electricity or fire matters: it's about noticing, understanding, and working with power.
Since subjects have power and objects don't, if one is unclear in one's mind and language about the difference, then one is confused about power, about life's drivers. On the other hand, if one is clear, it become possible to work with electricity without getting shocked, and fire without getting burned.
Clarity about subjects and objects can help untangle complex inter- and co-dependencies, understand agency, free will, volition, and incentives. It can reveal causes and drivers, resolve confusion and conflict, solve problems, correct mistakes, convey gratitude, give credit, assign praise, and promote, encourage, and reward excellence.
That is the advantage. That is how it matters.
Would you like a little help working safely with power? Please reach out. Thanks!
