Many people were kind enough to send me examples of errors they or others had made in business writing.
Here are a few examples.
Unconscious Slips
Embarrassment awaits those who blithely type the contents of their unconscious mind – and don’t catch themselves before they hit “send.”
Someone wrote:
I recently started an email by saying “I pity you…” when I intended to say “A pity you could not make it to the meeting”.
“I know how busty you are.” The person meant to write “how busy you are.”
In this story, a woman had serious repercussions when she inadvertently wrote “Please call me when you get it” instead of “please call me when you get in.”
I was having trouble with a co-worker and it was starting to escalate to more senior management. We had slightly different hours and she always got in later than I.
One morning I sent her a response to her email meaning to say that I wanted to talk to her about the issue when she got “in” meaning when she got into the office. Instead I accidently wrote when she got ”it”. Spell check was in place but that didn’t catch that type of error. Of course all senior management was copied and I was called in for a talking to and I had no idea what I even done wrong. It took me so long to figure out my mistake that by the time I did all the damage was done. I had egg on my face for a long time with that group.
Spell-Check Errors
This is a classic: A huge roadside billboard extolling the virtues of South Bend, Indiana’s “Pubic Schools”.
Several people mentioned the “public/pubic” problem. “Pubic speaking is my favorite subject.”
Just as it is a mistake NOT to use a spell-checker, it is just as much a mistake to rely exclusively on the spell-checker. The spelling software will enable you to make substitutions like:
Without/with not
Trail/trial
Assets/Assess … you can guess. Several people wrote in with sad tales of inadvertent potty-talk.
One woman wrote, “Claims are reviewed by a six-member Quality Control Committee.” You can guess which word she misspelled.
No signing bonus here:
My favorite one, which I hear about a few times every year, is when lawyers say something like, “If you agree with the foregoing, please sing this page and return the document to me.”
In the Worktalk trainings, participants submit writing samples and we customize training exercises and examples. Someone once turned in a sample that said, “All invoices were singed and dated by the controller.” As this was a foreign-based company, I briefly wondered whether this was some culture-specific business practice. But I soon realized that it was just a common spell-check error.
One man wrote that he had a friend who, when writing a 10-page section of book about proper use of a docking facility (for boats), replaced the word “tentacle” with “testicle”. He said this happened about 20 times in the 10 pages. Painful!
Syntax Errors/Dangling Modifiers
A friend of mine, who as a teenager worked for a plumber, recently described to me an email he got asking, “How much would it cost for you to put me in a toilet?”
Someone sent me the classic church bulletin document that included gems like:
Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.
Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered.
The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.
Using the Wrong Word.
In the writing of a colleague I read the sentence: “She is not a shrieking violet.”
One man shared a mortifying case of mistaken cross-cultural communication:
I work for a Private Equity fund that invests in residential assets in Mexico. In January, I sent out countless emails to people attempting to wish them a Happy New Year by saying “Feliz Ano Nuevo”. Unfortunately, since I left the atilde (~) off the the n in Ano (iPhone challenge), it turned out that I was wishing all of my Mexican business relationships a “Happy New [far end of the digestive tract]“!<;/p>
Someone else pointed out another potential cross-cultural disaster. He wrote that his firm was preparing a major proposal to a Chinese company. Someone had referred to the fact that there were “no chinks in the supply chain.” Fortunately, an in-house reader picked this up before the document went to China and offended the client.
Another fellow shared the following howler:
I received an email explaining that an application would be unavailable from Friday evening to Monday morning while the servers were being moved. The note said, “We apologize for any incontinence that this may cause you.” I guess they were concerned that their outage would cause some accidents. <;/p>
Whether writing errors come from unconscious slips, over-reliance on spell-checking software or simple ignorance, they damage credibility and professionalism in business writing. Reread everything slowly – aloud – before you send it out. If you have any doubt about the meaning of a word, look it up. If the document is really important, have someone else read it and comment on it before you send it out. Strive for perfect proofreading. Just as you wouldn’t attend an important business meeting with ketchup on your shirt, don’t present yourself in writing unless you are sure your words are right.
To all those who shared their stories – thanks!