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Recently, I got one of those emailed questions from a LinkedIn group I’m a member of.

The person posting the question wanted to know the marketing words or terms people found most annoying or overused. I had a pleasant little exchange with a gentleman from the UK who’s not too jazzed about “quality.” The point he makes—a good one, I think—is that most products these days are pretty reasonable quality. “Quality” gets a company out the gate, and trumpeting it doesn’t add much to a marketing message.

I’m not too crazy about the word “utilize,” which I see frequently in marketing collateral, because it’s got that fussy, over-elaborated feel. (Engineers seem to love it, though.) I also find myself annoyed by “business driver,” “proactive,” “solution,” and “value-add.”

Last Friday, my colleague Dale Riehart and I talked about marketing lingo over a great lunch at La Corneta in downtown Burlingame. Dale’s approach is to ask if a specific term is one his client’s prospects and customers use. If it is, he uses it. That’s the smart and reasonable way to do things. As copywriters, we need meet to the market where it is—though I believe our job is also to suggest better-sounding alternatives.

Now then, which overused and annoying marketing expressions get your vote?

In response to my recent post Who vs. That, a reader noted that she still struggles a bit with which and that.

Now even ace copywriters like moi are sometimes unsure about when to use which and when to use that. In the end, I bet some of us wing it, hoping that no one will pick up on our flubs.

So here’s the skinny.

Emeritus Professor Paul Brians of Washington State University “confesses” that he does not always observe the distinction between the two and doesn’t believe that many “careful writers of English” do either.

His rule, designed to “pacify” a “small but impassioned group of authorities”—don’t you love how this guy writes?—is this: If you’re calling something out by distinguishing it from a larger group, use “that.” If you’re not, use “which” and precede your clause with a comma. His example? “He made an iceberg Caesar Salad, which didn’t taste quite right.”

I love Professor Brians’ faint tone of scholarly irascibility, and I heartily recommend checking out his web page, “Common Errors in English.”

Now, on to my other all-time favorite grammar authority, Patricia T. O’Conner, author of Woe is I, The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English.

Ms. O’Conner exhorts us not to avoid using “that” out of a misplaced sense of elegance. Use that, she says, when you can’t drop the clause it precedes and still retain the meaning of the sentence. Her example? “The dog that won the best in show was Buster’s bulldog.” Take out “that won the best in show,” and your sentence has no reason to exist.

OK. Everybody clear? Go forth and prosper.

As some of you know, I think about branding frequently. Concerns about branding and how to do it right seem ubiquitous in the circles I travel in. Some of my copywriting clients are building a brand identity. Some, like Cisco, are actively involved in preserving, extending, and reinforcing one. And, so far, my projects with Taproot Foundation have been all about branding and messaging.

I love thinking and writing about branding at the local level. Here’s an example.

A few weeks ago, as I was driving past a neighborhood hardware store, I noticed it had become part of the Ace Hardware system. Would the change would be good? As a girl, I don’t spend a lot of time in hardware stores, but I love Wisnom’s . The people who work there answer dumb questions—and give great advice—with a smile. Thanks to Wisnom’s, I’ve gotten rid of cat pee odor, experienced superlatively sharpened kitchen knives, bought the right size sink stopper, and so on.

I drove by a few days later and noticed that signage had been repositioned to accommodate the Ace logo. The building’s façade looked pretty bad, what with the outlines of the old signage showing clearly. Could this be it, I wondered? Would it stay like this permanently? Oh me of little faith. I should have thought better of Wisnom’s. In less than a week, painters had completely covered the marks—and the rest of the building—with a fresh coat of cream-colored paint and repainted the harvest-red stripe that bands the top of the building.

Mu point is that Wisnom’s and many other businesses in my little town take the time to do things right. Of course, you could argue that Wisnom’s was merely acting on instructions from Ace HQ. I disagree. Owned by Ace or not, Wisnom’s would have made the fixes, because of the kind of organization it has always been. No wonder customers keep coming back. (“Fantastic hardware store! Forget Home Depot.”)

How often do you actually write something by hand, other than a grocery list—some well-organized souls have been known to use Outlook Tasks for that purpose—or a sticky note?

I was meditating on the power of the (hand) written word the other day, as I finished a letter to my stepmother in Virginia. And whaddya know, the cool women at High Tech Connect have been thinking about the same thing.

As they note, it’s getting harder and harder to find the occasion hand-write anything, given the ubiquity of email and texting, but nothing has greater impact than a hand-written, and therefore truly personal, communication. My sister-in-law just sent me a thank-you for her birthday check and took the time to indulge in a little epistolary chat about how she would spend the money. A client recently mailed a lovely note thanking me for my help and saying how much she had enjoyed working together. No doubt an email from her would also have felt great, but her note was like the maraschino cherry garnishing the whipped cream on top of an Irish Coffee.

No matter how lousy or crabbed your handwriting is, and mine wins no prizes, there are some communications for which there is NO substitute for seizing a pen and getting down to work. In the words of Sound Bytes, the High Tech Connect newsletter, “Want to make a real impression on someone today? WRITE them a note.”

For some reason, hearing a person referred to as “that” sorta sets my teeth on edge. As in, “John is the guy that won the apple pie-eating and St. Pauli Girl-drinking contest.” It just doesn’t sound right, though I can’t exactly say why. Perhaps my uneasiness has something to do with Miss Thompson’s 10^th grade English class, but dredging the depths of memory doesn’t bring up any specific prohibitions. Darn. Don’t you hate when that happens?

In fact, Patricia O’Conner, author of Woe is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English doesn’t have a problem with using “that” instead of “who.” As she notes, if “the girl that married dear old dad” sounds o.k., it’s because it is. Well, I have tremendous respect for Ms. O’Conner, and I know she must be right. Her little guide is the one I run to when I’ve got a quickie grammar question, and she’s never failed me. She makes the rules of grammar sing or at least hum a merry tune.

Still, I intend to persist stubbornly in referring to people as “who” rather than “that” What’s your take?

First, a confession. I’m not a PR person. Far from it. I practiced the art, and the operative word is “practiced,” a number of years ago at a couple of small Silicon Valley firms. That experience left me with enormous respect for the men and women who do media relations. The best of them are honest, hard working, persistent, and skillful. And their journalist counterparts are honest, hard working, and hungry for good stories—though not always the most patient of souls.

This post, though, is really about what’s up in the world of crisis PR—think BP, Tiger Woods, and Al Gore—and it summarizes a recent post by Matthew DeBord on Slate’s “The Big Money.” Mr. DeBord’s piece is worth reading for the quality of the writing alone, but if you don’t get around to it, here are the high points:

• Crisis PR, which DeBord refers to as “PR’s evil twin,” has always relied on a meat-eating, aggressive approach that “beat down” the forces of negativity.
• Today, companies that screw up are in big trouble, because the social media can overwhelm “even the most crafted battle crisis plan.”
• According to Ira Kalb, professor of marketing at USC, once a company has lost trust, it’s lost everything, and heaven help it if it’s caught spinning the news.
• Also according to Professor Kalb, crisis PR can still work, but…

So, how can crisis PR resuscitate itself? Well, it appears that counseling clients to propose solutions to a crisis, rather than resorting to the mea culpa approach is a good way to go. The other biggie is to bring the social media into its service by “maintaining numerous online angles of attack on The Big Bad Story.” In my view, that approach is a lot like herding cats, but greater strategic thinkers than I will undoubtedly figure it out.

It takes a certain quirkiness to enjoy a lively discussion of the rules of grammar. Copywriters often do, though it’s the sort of pastime that makes honest citizens roll their eyes and leave the room.

Rules of grammar have a good and honorable purpose, but some of them have had their day. Take “Never split an infinitive” and “Never end a sentence with a preposition.”

One of my favorite writers about grammatical matters, Patricia T. O’Conner, addresses both of these old warhorses (and others) in “The Living Dead,” one of many delightful chapters in Woe is I: A Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English. (Available on Amazon or Alibris, I’m sure, though I got mine for a buck at a Friends of the San Mateo Library sale and never a dollar better spent.)

The good news is that it’s fine to do both. Common sense rules. The “to” in what most of us think of as an infinitive—to jump, for example—is really not part of it. The verb “jump” is the infinitive, and “to” is sort of like an emcee that tells you the verb is on its way. (Think Ed McMahon.) So, if you want to say, “Dude, I wanted to totally jump on that when I heard about it,” you’re well within your rights.

Onward through the fog to prepositional endings. There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that some pundit told Winston Churchill he shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. His retort? Something like, “This is nonsense up with which I shall not put.”

So there you go. I will continue to merrily split infinitives when I can no longer restrain myself. As to prepositional endings, though, you will never hear me say is “Where’s he at?”

Today, I read a great post by PR expert and writer colleague, Kay Paumier of Communications Plus. Her post discussed the space between words, which was introduced by a monk sometime around 800 A.D. Who knew that people read aloud back then because thewordsallrantogether and they had to sound them out to grasp what was being communicated.

I love reading—and writing—about the more practical aspects of the written word. In a recent post, for example, I explored the magical power of type fonts, a topic that a surprising number of people found engaging.

Today, in the same spirit of practicality, I’m ruminating about headlines. Like eyebrows on a face, they create interest and engagement. If that seems a little overstated, consider those Dutch and Flemish paintings of the 15^th and 16^th centuries where some of the ladies appear to have no eyebrows. The artistry is exquisite, but those babes look a touch bland. My immediate reaction is to seek out a Frida Kahlo self-portrait. No mistaking the eyebrows there.

My idol, David Ogilvy, lauds headlines for their sales power, noting that five times as many people read headlines as they do body copy. Then he says, “It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money.”

I myself love a copywriting project where I have to come up with headlines. Compared to writing a headline—or subhead—creating the prose is a piece of cake. As I see it, adding interest to good copy with a great attention-grabbing headline is a lot like pulling out the eyebrow pencil when you doll up to go out.

This post is affectionately dedicated to the legions of copywriters out there who may be wondering if they’re creative enough.

Every day, we writers create—I hesitate to say “grind out,” though it sometimes feels that way—reams of copy. We write from scratch, or we take what clients throw over the fence and clean it up. At a minimum, we create an acceptable product. And when the gods are with us and the winds favorable, we can look with pride on what we’ve done.

I’ve just begun to re-read Ogilvy on Advertising, a wonderful book that retains much of its relevance 27 years after initial publication. I’m newly encouraged by what this curmudgeon of creativity says.

Ogilvy opines that advertising—and by extension, copywriting—is not “entertainment or an art form.” His standard of excellence is simple, though not necessarily easy to achieve. “When I write an advertisement,” he says, “I don’t want you to tell me that you find it creative. I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.”

That’s what my colleagues and I do every day. We write the prose that explains what a product (or service) does and why it will make you happy, popular, or successful in your career. We urge you to buy, lease, sign up, become an early adopter, take the plunge. If, as Ogilvy notes, our words move prospects from contemplation to action, we’ve served our clients and our own creative impulses well.

Not Fade Away

The other day, I picked up a copy of the AARP Bulletin. (And yes, it is delivered to my home.) I roll my eyes when it arrives, but occasionally, nestled among articles about healthcare and egregious injustices done to older Americans, there’s some lighthearted content.

The cover of this particular issue promoted a piece titled “Beam Me Up Scotty! And 49 other phrases that refuse to die.” Flipping to it, I came upon a smorgasbord of wonderful expressions.

I chuckled over “Big cheese,” as in “He thinks he’s such a big cheese.” I mused over “Sound like a broken record,” which has particular poignancy for those who had monster collections of vinyl. And I thought about how young women of yore wanted to have a “full dance card.” These expressions fire up memory, imagination, and curiosity about what life was like in the olden days. They invite time travel, if only through old novels and vintage flicks.

Each era abounds in expressions that are wonderfully evocative, and, thank goodness, many of them hang around for generations. I look forward to saying “Groovy” or “What a bummer” well into my dotage and passing it along.

(The title of this post, by the way, is shamelessly cribbed from “Not Fade Away,” that  fabulous tune recorded by Buddy Holly, the Dead, and my fave bad boys of all time, the Stones.)