More than/less than vs over/under

I'm all for being concise. But there is an exception that I'm rather pedantic about.

I see it all the time, particularly in advertising - "Chairs for under $100 each", "Return tickets to Melbourne for under $150", "Don't pay over $1000". It makes me cringe.

The words 'under' and 'over' should only be used to describe something that is physically 'below' or 'above'. For example, "The bear went over the mountain" and "I'd like to be under the sea".

When describing a cost, amount or figure, 'more than' and 'less than' should always be used - "Chairs for less than $100 each, "Return tickets to Melbourne for less than $150", "Don't pay more than $1000".

Try to remember this rule next time you book a newspaper or TV ad. You'll be making my leisure time so much more relaxing!

Metamorphosis

I'm wondering if it matters that this blog, which was meant to document the creation of a communications business, has morphed into somewhere for me to vent about language style. I'm hoping I may be assisting others to learn more about style and I'm providing a forum for people to express their views about style. It's also a good way to get my FB and Twitter fans to discover what Leviathan Communications is about ... or at least for them to find out about my editing passion!

Silly me

I must be a dolt. I've only just worked out where to find people's comments on my blog!

Numbers - to use digits or spell out

Another one of my pet peeves is when people spell out numbers that have double or more figures. The convention is to spell out in full numbers zero to nine and then write numbers 10 and onwards in digits. The reasoning for this is, when you get into double or more figures, the written forms of the numbers get longer and longer. It's more concise to use digits.

I had a client who just couldn't cope with me writing 'six-to-12 months'. She asked me for the reasoning and understood it, and she lived with it ... for a little while. But when we got close to print, she asked me to change the phrase to 'six-to-twelve months'. Because she was the client, I made the change, but it pained me to do so!

Yet I do understand where she is coming from. To someone who doesn't live and breathe style conventions, it must look like a mistake to have a number spelled out in full followed by a number written in digits. 'Twelve' isn't a particularly long word. Am I just pedantic? Is there room for flexibility?

Inverted pyramid news writing style

Good writing is so easy to achieve, but many people find it difficult because they don't know the basic rules. Writing stories for your newsletter or website should be simple because this type of writing conforms to a formula. You don't have to be a good writer to get your message across.

When writing news content for communications such as newsletters, bulletins, websites or fact sheets, the ‘inverted pyramid’ writing style is preferred. Imagine a pyramid standing on its point. This style enables readers to get the gist of 'what happened', if they don’t have time to read the entire story, by putting the news at the very top of the story.

Ideally, the most important information will be contained in the first paragraph and the least important information is contained in the last paragraph.

This enables an editor who needs to shorten a story, to remove sentences from the bottom of the story without cutting out any essential information. It also allows the reader to digest the information in the order of most importance.

The first sentence of a news story - called the ‘lead’ - should answer the two most important questions about the subject of your article: ‘who?’ and ‘what?’. The ‘who’ is who your article is about - be it a person, a program or a place - and the ‘what?’ is what happened to that person, program or place to make the information newsworthy. The ‘who?’ and ‘what?’ are not always obvious. They need to be carefully considered so the resulting story is about the most important subject.

Note: In news writing, a paragraph should be no longer than three sentences and sentences should be no longer than 30 words.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

Forward slashes - to space or not to space

I've been having trouble getting people interested in visiting my website from Twitter. My friend, who is an expert on all things social media, says it's because I need to be communicating about my area of expertise - I need to communicate about communication.

So I'm sharing something dear to my heart - my love of punctuation. Tragic I know.

I'm pretty good with most punctuation (don't use this blog to attest to that - this is my informal communications forum), but forward slashes have been frustrating me.

My feeling has been that they should conform to the conventions of other punctuation such as the full stop or the comma. That is, full stops and commas come directly after a word, but have a space after them. So my personal style preference has been to do this - word/ next word. Trouble is, my clients always go through my work and query why I have done this. Hence, I've decided to scrap this style in my editing.

So I wanted to find out the convention. Surprisingly, not many websites dedicated to punctuation tackle the use of the forward slash, but I did find quite a lot of online discussions on their use.

And the verdict is ...

If you are using a forward slash to separate two phrases, put a space before and after the forward slash (eg: pay by credit card / pay by money order). This rule also applies if you have a phrase on one side of the forward slash and a single word on the other side (eg: credit card / cash).

If you are using a forward slash to separate two short words, don't put a space on either side of of the forward slash (eg: credit/cash).

That leaves us with long words separated by a forward slash and for this, I am making up my own rule. I'm going to say, if both words separated by the forward slash have eight or more letters, a space is required on each side of the forward slash (eg: elephant / kangaroo). My reasoning for this is that a very long stretch of continuous text can look odd within a paragraph. I wonder if my new rule will catch on!

There are loads of other issues related to forward slashes such as long html addresses that fill more than one line of text and any use of a forward slash that requires the information after the forward slash to spill over onto the next line. I'll investigate this and get back to you.

Thanks for indulging me!

Loop hole

Yippee. There is a loop hole. Because I don't work full time, I'm allowed to do other work without getting permission from my CE. One less thing to worry about.