On a recent trip through the friendly skies, I engaged in my usual in-flight entertainment – browsing through SkyMall. This delightfully ubiquitous airplane shopping magazine advertises the most random collection of items in one place and encourages readers to take home the free copy as they promise to replace it. This issue of SkyMall features such can’t-live-without items as a singing toothbrush that will broadcast pre-loaded hits while you brush your pearly whites (Gangum Style anyone?), a Bigfoot tree sculpture that you can nail into your favorite tree to frighten your neighbors and a business shirt with a removable Velcro collar so when the collar gets shabby, you can just replace the collar and keep the shirt.
A catchy slogan on a T-shirt, however, was the item that really caught my attention at 26,000 feet:
Let’s eat Grandma.
Let’s eat, Grandma.
Commas save lives.
This was a reminder about the importance of the lowly comma and in a more big-picture thought, the importance of proper punctuation and grammar. We learned the basics in K-12 but we deduce the informality of email, the abbreviated writing of text messages and the emoticon inserts have spilled over from friends and family conversations and Facebook chats to business communication and has caused formerly masterful writers to have an lol moment in their office talk.
LGK urges you right now to stop. “Hey there” is not an appropriate greeting for an email in a professional environment, BFFs are not found in the cubicle next door and a winking smiley face is not a cute thing to add to a salutation. Keep it proper, keep it professional. It sets the tone for the relationship and presents an image every business wants with their staff and clients. It shows you pay attention to the little things, the details and it lets others know you are serious, thorough and accurate.
There are many style and grammar guides on the internet (in case you get a memory lapse about where to put a period with a parenthetical expression). (The answer is to put the period outside the parentheses unless the entire sentence is enclosed in parentheses, in which case you would put the period inside.) We can excuse an occasional slip, but there’s little room for error with the automatic squiggly line warnings in word processing software. The “its vs. it’s” transgression is a particular pet peeve of ours along with the utterance of the sound “irregardless,” which we can’t really call a word because it’s not. (“Regardless” is the word.) Rounding out our top three is the overuse of the exclamation point – we just don’t understand all the excitement in memos! One exclamation point should be used with caution, but two and three? Again, we say STOP!!!
One of our favorite sites for help is the Grammar Girl. She gives quick and dirty tips. Another great place to get answers and explanations about periods, commas and the like is The Punctuation Guide.
So, thank you SKyMall for the inspiration behind this article and for saving Grandma.
Do you have a question about grammar or punctuation? Do you have an easy way to remember “who vs. whom” or a common grammar issue you see that’s bothersome? We’d love to hear it.
Skymall update: sadly, they have gone out of business. Goodbye singing toothbrush…
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