GrammarPhile Blog

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.)

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

• 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.

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

There’s a common joke among writers: “It’s easier to start over than to copyedit.”

Nobody laughs at the joke. They mostly just nod their heads, as if to say, “It’s funny cause it’s true.” Copyediting poor writing is a little like trying to clean a hoarded house without removing the hoard beforehand.

The interesting bit about that joke is that it came about in response to human writing, and not even necessarily poor writing. But it applies to AI-generated copy as well.

As a team of writers, proofreaders, editors, copywriters, and copyeditors who’ve seen the good, the bad, and the dreadful across nearly every industry, organization size, and type of content imaginable, we feel compelled to reveal a few downsides.

The Downsides of AI-Generated Text

We understand the impetus for using AI-generated copy. It’s fast; it’s cheap; it’s easy. It doesn’t talk back.

But these aren’t hypothetical downsides. They’re not reactive, “We’re afraid for our jobs” types. They’re not projected insecurity (i.e., “A machine can write better than moi? Better blow it to pieces.”). These are downsides we’ve already encountered, many times.

For example, consider a proposal one of our beloved clients recently submitted. We are intimately familiar with their voice, their products, their style guide, their content types, and their business model. It was immediately clear that the copy was AI-generated. It was also clear that to move it from what ranged between awkward and nonsensical to succinct and logical, we couldn’t just proofread it. We had to copyedit it…heavily.

Upon review, we made an estimated 5 times as many necessary edits as normal for jobs of the same length from this client. Oof.

Aka Becoming Famous for “Potatoe”*

Imagine your name is Phil. To make this theoretical scenario more believable, let’s give you a last name: Jamieson.

Phil Jamieson. I just pulled that out of thin air.

I want you to be able to picture yourself clearly, so I’ll say you’re 6'8" and you have a dashing head of hair. You’re also running for Congress, Phil. You need votes, lots of them.

You hire a brilliant political campaign manager with years of experience. She knows all the slick moves, all the ways to undercut your opponents, every smart strategy behind plowing your way to the top.

Your campaign manager picks a brilliant theme song (Born in the U.S.A.) and outlines a content production plan, including ads for every medium, compelling speeches, and made-in-Hallmark photo ops. She’s got the 411 on every development in your opponents’ campaigns before they happen. She’s a regular networking powerhouse. She’s even got the dirt—the sleezy shenanigans the other side doesn’t want anybody to know about—in her back pocket. In other words, Phil, you’re a shoo-in.

And then it all falls apart.

Because your ads are full of snafus. They’re rife with redundancies. They’re torn asunder by typos.

I used to proofread my text messages. I’d use proper punctuation, fix all autocorrect atrocities, and even insert paragraph breaks.

Those days are long past.

Now, some of my friends and closest family members get texts along the lines of “Need graspy straws. Blogget can’t find tham. Good nigbt.” with a follow-up text of “Interpret as needed. ‘Talk to text’ is a dum-dum.’” (I’ve converted the swear words for the sake of propriety.)

Why do I tell text recipients to “ignore typos” almost as often as I create a typo? Because I text a lot more often. I write a lot more often. My fingers and mouth are steady streams of words.

And when you write a lot of words—especially when you have to do so quickly—errors are inevitable.

But I have a dirty little confession (one that’s in your dingy back pocket too if you’d let anybody see it): While volume and speed are rife with error-prone possibilities, the truth is that proofing your own writing is like trying to pinpoint your character flaws while gossiping about your trainwreck of a neighbor.

It don’t work good.

When you plant a whole forest, picking your way through the trees produces blindness—to the roots, the diseases, the limbs akimbo—to all the details. And the more times you pick through those woods, the hazier the view.