Most every country

Here's something else that cropped up in the online training course on data privacy that I took recently (click on the image to see a larger version):

"Most every country"? As well as appearing twice in print (as shown), it was also used once in the audio track that accompanied the visuals.

On this usage of 'most', the OED Online says:

Chiefly N. Amer. Modifying certain universal and non-assertive determiners and pronouns, as all, any, every, anyone, everything, etc., and corresponding adverbs of time and place, as always, anywhere, everywhere.

This adverbial usage of 'most' seems rather colloquial to me, and not appropriate for a company training course - but then I'm a British English speaker.

Any American English speakers out there want to comment?

'Never reply to unexpected emails'

As part of my job I've recently had to take an online training course on data privacy and security. The section 'Best practices for combating pretexting and phishing attempts' contained this useful piece of advice:




Many of the work-related emails I receive, particularly those from our customers or users, are "unexpected". If I never replied to them, my data would be safe but my job wouldn't...

Redemial racehorsing and real-play

I was on a training course yesterday with a chap who littered his speech with spoonerisms. Two particularly good ones he came out with were racehorsing (for 'horseracing') and redemial (for 'remedial').

And I'd also like to share this snippet from the pre-course information:

We will be using real-life situations in skills practice. There will be no role-play, only real-play!

'On a scale of 1 to 10 where 0 is poor'

I've been on a training course called 'Managing High-Performing Teams' for the past couple of days. I've enjoyed it, and maybe I'll write some more about it tomorrow, but for now I just want to share this extract from the course materials:

Scaling: On a scale of 1 to 10 where 0 is poor and 10 is world class, where would you put performance today?

Is it possible to have 0 in a scale of 1 to 10? Or is it just that I'm not allowed to choose 'poor' as my answer?

Photo special: infer / imply

Today I took an online course on competition laws ('antitrust' to some of you), and I was pleased to see it contained this example of infer/imply confusion:



Great photo too.

For further information text REDUNDANT

I was handed this leaflet in the street earlier in the week:

What I really like is the sentence in bold: "For further information text REDUNDANT to 60777". Talk about salt in the wound!

Why not ask people to text in something more positive such as 'TRAINING' or 'SKILLS'?

Hyphens: 'big fish processing plant'

Just a quick one today as I've been on a CS3 training course all afternoon.

Here's a phrase from recent raw copy that could have benefited from a hyphen:

big fish processing plant

Is that a big plant that processes fish, or a plant that processes big fish? The former, I would assume...

Our mag: par for the course

The magazine that Apus and I work for, like many magazines, has a column that lists events and courses. In the column this week, one company is offering a "five-day initial course" in a particular subject, as well as a "six-day refresher course" - in the same subject!

So it takes five days to learn, and six days to be reminded of it when you've forgotten it...

Chunk down and front-load your copy

Yesterday I wrote about the 'sticky content' course I was about to attend. It turned out that, rather embarrassingly, the course wasn't about sticky content at all. I was misled by a classic piece of corporate miscommunication, an email that read:

Sticky content Web Training
I am pleased to confirm you are booked onto the above course

In reality - as I found out once I had taken my seat - the course was called 'Writing for the web' and Sticky Content was the name of the company running it. Never mind...

However I did learn a couple of new buzzphrases on my non-sticky content course. They are two things you should do to your copy when writing for the web.

• Chunk down: break your copy into chunks; try to use lists, bullets (like this for example), smaller paragraphs.
• Front-load: Put the most important words at the beginning of your title or heading; put the most important part of the story at the beginning as well.

So there you go. My content is not sticky, but it will henceforth be chunked down and front-loaded (and there's a sentence I've never written before).

Sticky content

Not much of a post today I'm afraid because I'm about to go on a work-related course - on the interesting subject of 'sticky content'.

I'll know more about it by the end of the day, but sticky content, as I've had to explain to several people already, is content on a website that has the purpose of getting users to return to that website repeatedly. And no, not necessarily porn - forums are a good example of sticky content, as are games and competitions.

According to Wikipedia, sticky content is also rather suggestively known as 'sticky gear' or 'sticky tools'...