GrammarPhile Blog

Misspelled or Misused Words

philj@proofreadnow.com (Phil Jamieson) — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 11:30:00 GMT

As professional B2B proofreaders, we see lots of documents and lots of mistakes. Here are some words and phrases that we often see misspelled or misused.

1. Whoa

A word becoming more common in B2B newsletters is whoa. Maybe it’s a reaction to tariff news. Maybe it’s used to tell your politicking friends to chill. Maybe it’s just a simple imperative. We see it misspelled woah all too often. Whoa! Don’t do that!

2. Canceled

How about the past tense of cancel? It’s got only ONE l. That is, unless you’re British…or Canadian…or Australian. Sure, you’ve seen all those TV news clips when planes are backed up and the air traffic boards have Cancelled all over them. But please gag when you see that and drop a note to the FAA. It’s canceled!

AI Written Blog Post: AI Writing vs Human Writing: Pros and Cons

conni@proofreadnow.com (Conni Eversull) — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 16:21:17 GMT

Explore the dynamic battleground of AI writing and human creativity, where the pen meets the algorithm.

Understanding the Mechanics of AI Writing

AI writing leverages advanced algorithms and machine learning models to generate text. These systems are trained on vast datasets, encompassing a wide range of subjects and writing styles. The primary goal is to mimic human writing by recognizing patterns in the data and predicting the next word or phrase based on the context.

While AI writing can produce coherent and contextually relevant content, it operates within the confines of its programming and data inputs. This means that while it can handle repetitive tasks and generate large volumes of text quickly, it may struggle with nuanced topics or creative expression that falls outside its trained data.

Howls for Vowels

philj@proofreadnow.com (Phil Jamieson) — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 14:01:00 GMT

Who will win today? Anyone? Everyone! Individuals? Organizations? Even Unions?

The vowels are A, E, I, O, and U. If you thought Y was a vowel, you’re only half right since Y is a semi-vowel.

Here’s an interesting thought, one that probably had not occurred to you earlier today, this week, or even this lifetime: Vowels are created by the free passage of breath through the larynx and mouth. When the mouth is obstructed during speech production—most often by the tongue or teeth—the resulting sound is a consonant. Try that right now.

Want more about vowels? Here are 10 of the 4,000-plus English words containing all the vowels. If you get them all, you’ll get an A. If you get none, you’ll get that consonant that comes after E.

Resist the Pressure of AI: A Cautionary Tale

Lisa Veilleux — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 14:00:00 GMT

To loosely paraphrase the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, “It is a movie trope universally acknowledged that a being in possession of advanced technology must be in want of some common sense.” A few cases in point: The invading aliens in War of the Worlds succumbed to ordinary bacteria. The nefarious schemes of not only the aliens (again) in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs but also the Wicked Witch of the West (advanced technologies: flying broom and monkeys) were thwarted by nothing more than water … what a world, what a world. And even though 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 calmly asserted that his disconnection was something he could not allow to happen, the supercomputer failed to anticipate Dave Bowman’s reentry through the emergency airlock to do just that.

In each of these cinematic examples, a supposedly superior technology was laid low by something it seems a superior technology really should have been a bit more aware of. And if life imitates art, is AI—arguably our most advanced technology to date—destined to be tripped up by something equally innocuous? If so, what might be its kryptonite? Those in the know have variously proposed data quality, context, sarcasm, intuition, hallucinations, and hands. (As images generated by AI reveal, it struggles to identify what constitutes a human hand.)

Difficult to Understate?

philj@proofreadnow.com (Phil Jamieson) — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 14:30:00 GMT

I just received an email from a prominent law firm advertising an upcoming seminar on the latest promises of a new generation of computing. Most business people would recognize the firm’s name, but of course we’ll not mention it here for fear of a gigantic lawsuit, or at least a C&D letter. (They’re LAWYERS, after all!)

The first paragraph briefly described the great power and many advantages coming with next-gen computing and ended with this sentence:

"It's impossible to understate the power this new form of computing will demonstrate." (Italics are mine.)

See the flub? It’s akin to that common mistake one hears so often: “I could care less.” I am pretty sure the article was AI-generated, for it had a plethora of repeated concepts, a lot of strung out phrasing, and plenty of word salad to get the count up to some stated goal.

This law firm doesn’t look so great when they blithely let grammatical mistakes like this one go unpunished. They meant “overstate,” of course, as they meant to say something like “You just can’t find the words to express how great the impacts of such power will be. Even if you guessed a billion times faster and a trillion times cheaper, you’d still be low."

Stupid Wordle Words

philj@proofreadnow.com (Phil Jamieson) — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 13:00:00 GMT

Lots of us are playing Wordle every day. If you’re not playing Wordle, you should be. After all, Wordle can save you! Just ask the 80-year-old woman in Chicago who was saved from a naked stranger who insisted she take a bath with him! Yuk! Anyway, if you are playing, check out our list of stupid Wordle words (5 letters, no plurals, no proper nouns) and see if you recognize any. You never know when these are going to show up.

The $189 Million Missing Math Symbol

richmond.sara04@gmail.com (Sara Richmond) — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 12:00:00 GMT

And other expensive typos

People like to minimize typos, especially in today’s world of casual communication and 1,000-mile-an-hour news updates. It’s “just a comma.” Who cares if it’s “would of” or “would’ve”? Do we really need to know the difference between “there,” “they’re,” and “their”?

Tell that to the people who wrote these political ads. Or to NASA’s bank account, about 60 years ago.

July 22, 1962, was going to be an expensive day for NASA, no matter what happened. It was launch day for Mariner I, the first of two spacecraft designed to travel to Venus for some long-distance scientific flirting (e.g., “That’s a good-looking solar wind you’ve got going on, baby. Mind if I measure it?”).

Everything was going according to plan. Every preparation had been made. Everything checked and rechecked. The countdown began.

3, 2, 1, liftoff (probably sounding like “pewwwww” or “whoosh” or 10,000 toilets flushing simultaneously).

Moments later, the rocket veered off course. After failing to reestablish control, NASA had no choice but to destroy it.

"We the People" Love Word Quizzes

philj@proofreadnow.com (Phil Jamieson) — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 12:00:00 GMT

It’s a good week to celebrate our independence – make that Independence with a capital I. The Declaration of Independence is dated July 4, 1776, but was signed in August of that year by brave patriots who risked their property, possessions and their very lives to start a new nation. Our words today deal with freedom, independence (or lack of it) and rights. Never forget that freedom was and is not free. Long live America!

Select your answer below for each question. When done, you'll see your score and the correct answers.

How to Fix the 10 Biggest Problems with Your B2B Marketing Content

richmond.sara04@gmail.com (Sara Richmond) — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 13:00:00 GMT

We don’t believe in simply whining about problems. We’d rather be part of the solution. To that aim, here’s the follow-up to our last post on The 10 Biggest Problems with Most B2B Marketing Content.

If you find your B2B marketing content lackluster, ineffective, or willy-nilly to the detriment of your sales, your marketing team’s motivation, and your sanity, check out our suggestions for fixing the 10 most-common problems we’ve observed in B2B marketing content.

How to Fix the 10 Biggest Problems with Your B2B Marketing Content

1. Get and give clarity. Answer the five “W” questions (who, what, when, where, and why) in as basic terms as possible, internally. Apply those answers to all your customer-facing messaging, with an emphasis on the most succinct answers to the following three questions:

What is our product/service/offer?
Who does it help? (Who are you trying to talk to? Who is your ideal customer?)
Why does it matter? (If potential customers don’t identify with your purpose, benefits, values, differentiators, etc., then you’ll be hard put to make them loyal.)

2. Set aside your ego and fear of not being taken seriously. Being personable and an expert aren’t mutually exclusive. If you take stock of major pitfalls of the digital age, they generally revolve around a lack of humanity and healthy relationships, including between businesses and their clients. The most feared people may be monolithic enigmas, but the most loved people (and companies and brands) are the ones who treat others well while allowing themselves to be truly known.

The 10 Biggest Problems with Most B2B Marketing Content

richmond.sara04@gmail.com (Sara Richmond) — Thu, 23 May 2024 15:00:00 GMT

Aka The Lime-Green Lycra Bodysuit

What would you do if your best friend bought a lime-green Lycra bodysuit to wear to a professional awards ceremony sure to be publicized on television?

After you briefly considered dousing the bodysuit in gasoline and lighting it on fire (it’d be hard to sell that as an “accident”), you’d shoot straight with them:

“This is a bad decision. The bodysuit is hideous. It would make the most attractive person on Earth look like a baked bean.”

And you’d be a good friend for doing so.

Now it’s our turn. Except the publicized awards ceremony is B2B content marketing. And the lime-green Lycra body suit is the 10 ways most companies inadvertently alienate everyone who comes across their marketing content.

Deep breath. Here we go.

The 10 Biggest Problems with Most B2B Marketing Content

It’s unclear. I’ve often gone to a B2B website and thought, “What do these people actually DO?” If people don’t understand what you do, the chances of them becoming a client immediately wither.
It’s rife with jargon and self-importance. Everyone is “reinventing” or “unleashing” or “transforming” something. If it’s a law firm, they practice “at the intersection” of three or four specialties. Even if you were to simplify the message, you’d be left with meaningless fluff. The copy sings “Me, me, me!” over and over, a little like a 3-year-old. And we all know how self-absorbed those little stinkers are, no matter how cute.
It’s boring. This is partly because the people approving the content lack the bravery to sound and be different. Guess who wants to read 12,087 iterations of the same thing? Nobody. Not even your mama when you’re the one who wrote it.
It’s poorly structured. It doesn’t consider our natural scanning tendencies (e.g., the Z pattern). There are poor or absent transitions from one thought or section to the next. There’s no intuitive narrative. It’s like the “junk” drawer in your kitchen. Full of potentially valuable stuff that’s entangled, hidden, or mixed together.