Reach for your red pen and try your hand at this short summer quiz. What corrections and other refinements would you make in the following two sentences?
1. The principal reason I held a meeting with the Marketing staff was because we need a new liason with Channel 7.
2. The panel of advisers were emphatic about the need to make positive changes in personnel policy, but our CEO seemed disinterested.
The answers
1. The principal reason I held a meeting with the Marketing staff was because we need a new liason with Channel 7.
A. “Principal” is a decoy. The “-al” ending is correct when we mean “main” or “chief.”
B. Watch out for the fat phrase “held a meeting.” Just say “met.”
C. No need for the initial cap in “Marketing”; it’s not the full name of the department.
D. Watch out for the “reason … because” redundancy. Use one or the other. (Opting for “because” is usually shorter: The reason I tapped Ann was her overall attitude. I tapped Ann because of her overall attitude.)
E. “Liaison” is misspelled.
F. The initial cap in “Channel 7” is right. That’s an official name along with the station’s call letters.
So we might up with this: I met with the marketing staff principally because we need a new liaison with Channel 7.
2. The panel of advisers were emphatic about the need to make positive changes in personnel policy, but our CEO seemed disinterested.
A. “Advisers” is another decoy. Although we see “advisor” more, dictionaries give the “-er” ending top billing.
B. “Were” should be “was.” This may be the toughest call in the quiz because subject-verb agreement can be so troublesome with collective nouns like “panel,” “group,” and “staff” that we’re often wise to reword. Here, however, the panel is acting as one voice and clearly seems singular.
C. Watch out for “positive” and “negative.” They often appear in imprecise phrasing (such as here, where “improvements” would be better than “positive changes”) and in redundancies like “positive gains.”
D. Yes, “CEO” in all caps is the way to go.
E. “Disinterested” is considered acceptable as a substitute for “uninterested,” but fussier writers reserve the word for expressing impartiality – in other words, having no vested interest in an outcome. (We want a jury to be disinterested, not uninterested.)
This might be our revised sentence: The panel of advisers was emphatic about the need (or emphasized the need) to improve personnel policy, but our CEO seemed uninterested.
In addition to presenting workshops on writing in the workplace, Norm Friedman is a writer, editor, and writing coach. His 100+ Instant Writing Tips is a brief “non-textbook” to help individuals overcome common writing errors and write with more finesse and impact. Learn more at http://www.normfriedman.com/index.shtml.