Letting her little light shine!

Sometimes you just can't hide your light under a bushel. You have to let it shine.

Today, my associate at Correct Me If I'm Wrong, Sharon Farber, received this testimonial as a consequence of the outstanding job she did for one of our clients. I'm publishing it here because I think the world of her and I want you to find out how special she is in the words of someone who received no personal benefit from writing this rave letter. Here it is.

As President/CEO of Thrombovision, Inc. I would like to offer a testimonial of my experience with Sharon Farber of Correct Me If I’m Wrong in writing the Business Plan for ThromboVision. Sharon demonstrated a great deal of professionalism and handled each and every task with deft attention to detail. She left no question unanswered, left nothing to chance and went well beyond our expectations in accomplishing our goals on time and within the allocated budget. As a novice in our industry, she was a quick study in learning our technology. Sharon’s close attention to detail and team approach working with us resulted in a world class document with the requisite underlying spreadsheets to credibly showcase our company. I recommend her without reservation.

Edward R. Teitel
MD, JD, MBA
President / CEO
ThromboVision Inc.
www.thrombovision.com

Now, wouldn't you be proud to work with someone like that?

The benefits of dyslexia

Last night I heard the funniest pick-up line ever.

We were sitting with our friends, John and Jane, at a restaurant, when John nudged his wife and said, "Look at her," indicating a woman at a nearby table. I looked too, of course, but didn't see anything particularly noteworthy. His wife looked and said, "Oh, sweetie. You remembered! She's wearing our T-shirt."

Now, I've heard of our song, our restaurant, our favorite beach, and countless other variations, but never our T-shirt. There had to be a story. And there was.

It seems that John and Jane had met countless years ago as tourists abroad. They happened to be staying at the same hotel and had each independently ended up at a casual event being held there for a visiting diplomat. Jane came to the party wearing a Chanel 5 T-shirt. You know... the perfume. Not knowing anyone at the party, John looked around and decided to approach this young woman who had caught his eye. Assuming that the press were covering the event, he went over to her and said, "Do you work for Channel 5?"

She cracked up!

The rest is history.

It was only later that she discovered he was dyslexic. Sometimes, there are some concrete benefits to having a reading disability.

Equal to none or Unequalled?

"Our service is equal to none!"

Oh, really? Well, I guess I'll go elsewhere.

I came across this gem in a client's writing today and I just had to comment.

The sentence as written means that the service is at the bottom of the heap. It literally says that the service is equal to no service.

What the client meant to say was that no other company can provide a service that comes up to my client's standard. It should have read "Our service is unequalled!"

English is a tricky language.

A malapropism by any other name

This week, my email contained three hilarious malapropisms.

In yesterday's mail, a friend's husband was updating us on his wife's status after recent surgery. He noted that the surgery was necessitated by Maurene's "Crone's disease," which immediately had me rotfl (rolling on the floor laughing).

Of course, Crohn's disease is no laughing matter, but for someone who just celebrated a 60th birthday, Crone's disease has that grotesque ring of truth. Luckily, while on vacation last year, I picked up a whole stack of greeting cards intended for my over-60 female friends that say "Crones celebrate." I will definitely be sending one of these to Maurene with a note for a full and speedy recovery.

Today, I opened a newsletter from copywriting guru John Forde. He held forth on the benefits of better communication for world peace, making the point that the same skills used to write good sales copy could be used to defuse conflicts in all kinds of situations.

I have no argument with his thesis.

What brought a smile to my face was the line, "I'll seal the deal by drawing taught those loose ends we talked about."

Ummm, Jack... The word you wanted was taut. But thanks for the lesson anyway.

The third instance was in another of John Forde's newsletters in an article called "Prospect Plundering 101" written by a guest columnist. The title made me think of piracy. The article itself was a lot less heavy-handed than its title and really addressed the issue of how to get to the emotions that underlie most purchases.

And the line that cracked me up? Judge for yourselves.

"Here's a list of neutral pass-back questions,
statements and actions to illicit the next level of
information."

Now I understand the title! (For you non-native English readers, illicit means illegal. The word he should have used was elicit, which means to draw forth.)

What is a malapropism? It's the use of an inappropriate word that has an accidental similarity to the word that should be used. If you remember the character Archie Bunker on that hilarious sitcom, All in the Family, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Many proofreading sites suggest that you read your work out loud to find errors, but that won't work for most malapropisms. The wrong words sound too much like the right ones -- that's the whole source of the problem. Spellcheckers won't find these errors either, since malapropisms are all legitimate words.

Over the years, many people have become associated with this unfortunate foot-in-mouth disease. It currently goes by the name Bushism. My advice? Always use a professional proofreading service to check your work. Otherwise, you risk having your name become the new standard bearer for malapropisms.

Less is More

Sometimes, you need to tell a customer "the whole story" as one of my favorite marketing gurus, Sean D'Souza says. But sometimes less is more.

I recently got a call from a client, Michael, asking for help dealing with a situation with one of his prospective customers -- let's call him Seiji. Things were getting out of hand. Michael sells sophisticated medical equipment. The product is quite technical and requires coordinating the settings on various pieces of apparatus. Since compressed oxygen is involved, it's important to get pressures in range and to proceed in the right order or things can get pretty explosive... literally!

Seiji had had some technical questions and Michael had tried to answer them. Several emails had gone back and forth, with each answer from Michael creating a new question in Seiji's mind. Instead of calming the waters, Michael's detailed answers seemed to be making matters worse. By the time Michael called for help, a very large sale was at serious risk!

Now understand that I'm an editor. I don't do counselling. But clearly, something about the way Michael was answering Seiji's inquiries was creating a problem. I read through the correspondence and realized that Michael needed to say less, not more!

It's the same mistake that an inexperienced, well-meaning parent often makes with very young children. The parent makes a request. The child says why. The parent explains, believing in the power of reason and logic. The child asks for further clarification. The parent explains. The child... Well, you know how it goes. In the end, the parent loses patience and yells "Because I said so!" Sometimes, it's better not to start down that road.

"Michael," I said, "he's asking you whether he's doing things correctly. He just needs to know yes or no. He doesn't need to know WHY he's right or wrong. Stop explaining! Let's make your next email as short as possible so that there's no room for him to create any more questions."

So we did. We cut Michael's draft down from 800 to 200 words. It was friendly, brief, and to the point.

It got the sale.

Ghoti?

Another day, another cautionary tale. And yes, I'm still dealing with names.

Most of my clients write to people in other countries. Today, I was editing a letter of introduction that my client David was sending to his associate, William, in the United States. In the letter, he was offering to set up a meeting between William and a man named Chaim.

Given that William is an American, I was pretty confident that he would try to pronounce the name Chaim in the same way one would pronounce the English word "chain" but with an "m" on the end. Bad choice! Chaim is actually a transliteration of a Hebrew name and in this case the transliteration needs some explanation... in fact, a whole lot of explanation.

Ch should be pronounced as a soft gutteral. It's a sound that doesn't exist in English.
a should be pronounced as "u" in the word "up."
i should be pronounced as "ee" in "wee."
m should be pronounced as "m."
There is also a "y" sound as in "yellow" between the "a" and the "i" that happens because there are two distinct vowel sounds one after the other.

So, in the end "Chaim" is pronounced more like "Hahyim."

I'm not suggesting that when faced with a similar situation that you put a whole pronunciation guide into your letter. We didn't. But I'm all for saving people from embarrassment if at all possible. In this case, we wrote:

"William, just a word of advice. Chaim is not pronounced the way it's written. I suggest you ask him how to say his name as soon as you meet. He'll set you straight."

And just for fun, did you know that "ghoti" is pronounced fish?

gh as in cough
o as in women
ti as in nation

That little gem has long been attributed to George Bernard Shaw!

By the way, my name, Rochelle, is pronounced:

R as in rose
o as in could
ch as in machine
ell as in spell
e is silent

Are you male or female? Your customers, clients and strategic partners want to know.

I was working with my client, Osnat, today. She was writing an e-mail to her customer, Aujne, and called me to check out some phrasing.

Well, I've let the cat out of the bag already. Yes, Osnat is a woman. But we weren't so sure about Aujne's gender.

"Osnat," I said. "Have you ever met this customer?"

"No," she answered. "Why do you ask?"

"Well, I was just wondering whether Aujne is a man's or a woman's name. We've been assuming that Aujne is a man in this invitation, but what if we're wrong... We've just asked him to let us know if his wife will be accompanying him. That could be pretty embarrassing if Aujne is a woman! Not only that," I said. "We don't know if Aujne has a wife or a husband or even what his or her sexual orientation is!"

Osnat and I ended up deciding to be much more diplomatic. First, we did a little detective work and found out that Aujne was a woman. Then we simply asked if anyone would be accompanying her.

Now put the shoe on the other foot. A similar situation could be happening in your customers' offices. If you haven't let them know whether you are male or female, you may be placing them in an awkward situation.

Don't assume that your first name makes it obvious. Here in Israel, Sharon is a unisex name. And maybe you remember that wonderful country and western song, A Boy Named Sue?

My advice for the day is to make sure that you include some clue to your gender when you first introduce yourself in writing. A Mr. or Ms as part of your signature can go a long way preventing future embarrassment for your customer, client, or strategic partner.

Now if your title happens to be Dr. or Prof., then your signature won't do the trick. You've got to get the information across in a more subtle way. I've been known to drop a reference to "my husband" into a note, as in "My husband and I have just returned from vacationing in Zimbabwe."

Got an anecdote to share about this issue? Please do!

Until next time,

Signing off,

Mrs. Rochelle Treister