Bad grammar "Eccos" relentlessly

Ecco makes pretty good shoes. Their ad agencies writes pretty painful ad copy.
From the recent "My World My Style" print and online campaign:

"I will spend the entire day just walking on my feet. So for my shoes, comfort and styles have to go hand and hand. My Ecco is Yucatan."

Do advertising agencies no longer employ copy editors? Does the "feel" of the copy outweigh the value of the words that produces it?
"I will spend the entire day just walking on my feet"...???? As opposed to.... your hands?? That would be quite a feat!
And less obvious but still grating: "comfort and styles have to go hand and hand." I get it, but when the product is shoes, isn't there a better simile??

On writing

I could be wrong about this, but I doubt it. (I once gave my dad a Father's Day card that had that sentiment). Email and IM and the immediacy they introduce into our lives are enabling people to write lousy sentences.
It's not just that email and IM are fast, throw-away forms of communication. They encourage fragmented thoughts (splash something out, hit send, move on to the next message or task).
In this world, prepositions grow like kudzu. They lengthen sentences, bore the reader and obscure meaning.
Write actively, not passively. Show your writing who's boss.

I came across this construction this week:

One of the key learning’s I want to start off by highlighting is never pretend to be something you’re not online.

That's what we get paid the big bucks for.

Sentences should be constructed in such a way that the reader is almost forced to stick with it from beginning to end--the way you roll down a grassy hill. For the reader, it should be effortless.

It's personal...or not

Screw up your pronouns, and you can look naked as a writer:

“Today’s savvy marketers are quickly realizing that viewing the customer as merely a target is a critical mistake. In fact, referring to the people that consume their products as anything other than people, is a mistake.”

And writing about people with a pronoun other than “who” is a mistake as well.

Onward... into new-word hell:

Onboarding: "...in the case of onboarding (adding a new hire)."

In some organizations, I hear this process can be as painful as waterboarding.

Trialing: "Advertisers have been willing to trial these products." It's trial to come across these constructions, but it's what I get paid the big bucks for!

From where I sit...

Before satellites and infrared technologies, sight was a major advantage in hunting, military campaigns and pioneering, to name a few.
I came across the construction today: "From my vantage point, it appears...."
Since vantage means "a position, condition or place affording...a commanding view," vantage point is redundant.

As is...
"Entirely new." That came from the same contributed piece I reviewed.

In an analyst report, I encountered this sentence:
"Having generated clear success on the public Internet, the question becomes whether or not these tools add business value."
Aside from the "public Internet" (because I have yet to come across the private Internet), the construction, while common, is nevertheless weird. It should be "xxx the question is 'do these tools add business value.?'"
Or...
"xxxthe issue becomes whether these tools add business value." (whether or not is just lazy grammar).

A (good) quote a day keeps the boredom away

One of the biggest challenges in journalism and PR is the quote. It's also the biggest lost opportunity.
In the wire-service business I was taught to quote someone only if I couldn't paraphrase the sentiment better. I was reminded that I was a writer, and that's what I got paid to do (I worked with a number of reporters over the years who used quotes liberally, and 99 percent of them aren't in the business anymore). A reporter or historian might have written "87 years ago," but Lincoln said "Four-score and seven," and they're four of the more memorable words in the English language.
In PR, quotes start out like crater-sized holes in a press release outline: "INSERT COMPANY/VENDOR/CUSTOMER QUOTE HERE." They go downhill from there. For many professionals, it's an afterthought. Almost without exception, press release quotes are dull and devoid of meaning.
Here's a winner from today's BusinessWire feed:

“By implementing a standard way of managing the collaboration between technologies, EDRM has capitalized on the industry’s readiness to work together and move the entire industry forward.”

Replace "EDRM" with anything and it works in any industry. It's also meaningless. It's like saying people love warm sunny days.
Quotes, although tricky to write well, don't have to be this bad.
If you're in PR, use the quote to get your message across in a way that can't be paraphrased (journalists use canned quotes all the time, but they won't use crappy ones). You will get pushback from your client, but persevere because it will pay off. If you're a journalist, keep asking questions until you get a quote you can use.
A lot of this is writing 101, but it gets lost in the flood of information we all produce every day.

Onward...

Rob Cox, on BreakingViews.com, has a fine post today that imagines a note from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, responding to MSFT's $44.6 billion offer to buy his company.

However fine the post, it contained a couple of teaching moments.
"...came as a complete surprise." While not a hard-core redundancy, this example illustrates how a little discipline can go a long way in writing. Surprise speaks for itself; unless there's a time element (latest surprise), why modify its degree? A surprise is a surprise is a surprise. The more we modify words that stand resolutely on their own, the more muddled our communication becomes.

"...articulating our admittedly complicated strategy." All "Jerry" has to write is the word "complicated," and he's admitting its complexity. This too can be a gray area, but it's better to put all adjectives and adverbs under the magnifying glass in the heat of the day. More often than not, you should end up searing them into oblivion.

Fighting flab

What got me rolling here was a short presentation I gave the staff on flabby language. I'd considered offering one-hour tutorials and bringing in pizza, but time's money in our business. Plan B was to do a couple of minutes at each all-hands meeting.
Here are some offenders I called out:

"Have already partnered/worked/etc." If you're using the past tense, it's already happened (or, I should say, 'it's happened.')

"Existing customers." If you keep using that construction with more pedantic customers, they won't be customers for long. What about "future customers" you ask. Well, in some circles we call those "prospects."

"Proven track record." A record is a record is a record. It's inherently proven because it's a record. If you want to get extreme, kill "track."

"Offers the ability to achieve unrivaled reach..." As a rule, ability is abused as a word in the communications business. In fact it's almost never used to describe someone's talents, as it should be. In the case here, "can reach," "offers unrivaled reach" work just fine.
And the best for last: "Brands seamlessly woven into XYZ’s vault of rich media." Not quite sure what that means, but weaves don't have seams; stitched materials do. And weaving something into a vault is a helluva technological achievement that even our asonishing age hasn't accomplished.