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It’s the sort of story that, at the height of silly season, must be a godsend for news editors: a much-criticised train company takes its passengers all the way back to where they started from just as they were arriving at their destination. 

The company involved was Eurotunnel, the starting-point was Folkestone and the destination Calais. Apparently an earlier fuel spill had put one of the compartments out of service, and when staff at the French end saw the empty compartment, they assumed the whole carriage was also empty and sent the ‘forgotten’ passengers back to the UK without giving them a chance to get off the train. 

Whoops. But what’s interesting about the story from our point of view is how the company handled the situation. We didn’t see the wording of their ‘profuse’ apology but it sounds as if they did a pretty good job of it. Their response certainly ticked a number of boxes for saying sorry: 

1. Act swiftly to start putting things right
2. Take responsibility/ownership of the problem
3. Give an unreserved, specific apology
4. Be positive and proactive – help customers with what to do next
5. Offer appropriate, useful compensation  

When the passengers arrived back at Folkestone, senior staff were there to meet them with an apology and details of their compensation – a full refund and a free trip in the future (1, 2, 3).  The explanation given by Eurotunnel’s press office didn’t attempt to dodge the issue – they put their hands up and admitted their mistake (3). The management quickly got them on the next available train to minimise their disruption (4). And finally, a full refund and a free trip seems more than reasonable to us (5). 

Despite the predictable treatment of the story in some quarters, we think that the way Eurotunnel handled this would have left their customers not ‘fuming’, but as happy as possible under the circumstances. Mistakes do happen, but get your apologies right and your relationship with your customers needn’t hit the buffers.

So the UK (well, London) has a new ‘high street’ bank – one that’s making headlines for being pooch-friendly and putting water bowls out for dogs. With the tagline ‘Love your bank at last’, Metro Bank is building its brand on providing a superior customer experience. But is it really going to keep this promise? 

The first new bank to launch in the UK for over 100 years, Metro is opening its doors seven days a week from 8am to 8pm. So that’s one big tick for face-to-face access. They boast a 24-hour customer service line seven days a week – one more tick for phone access. But there’s no internet banking (yet) – and that’s a big minus for many people. 

Without offering particularly competitive savings rates, Metro is banking purely (pardon the pun) on the customer service they say they’ll provide to give them a leading edge. But we’re left wondering whether they realise that a truly customer-focused experience needs to be more than just skin-deep. 

To make a big difference in the UK banking world, Metro will need to be transparent about their products and communicate clearly with their customers. They’ll need to send their customers the information they need, when they need it – and to offer online banking and customer service. Most importantly, they’ll have to create a climate of trust in a country full of scepticism about an industry that seems far more interested in making profits out of customers than in serving them. 

We’ll be watching this space…

Here it is: our #1 tip for making sure your words work well for you… 

Read. 

That’s it – read. 

Read over what you’ve written, preferably out loud. Listen to how the words sound and how they trip off the tongue. You’ll know right away if they sound stiff or awkward or if you get tangled up in a sentence. You’ll hear nuances in your tone and if something doesn’t make sense, you’ll realise it straight away. 

It’s simple, but it works. And you’d be surprised how often people don’t read over and listen to what they’ve written. Without hearing what you’re saying it’s hard to judge how it will sound to your reader. And you have to listen to words to catch their rhythm and voice. (This is why we think speed reading is cutting a corner too far.) 

Reading out loud is a technique we emphasise on our training programmes, and one we practise daily here at lorry HQ. 

And there’s another side to this all-important advice to read. If you’re writing in response to something, you really should read it carefully to make sure your response fits the bill. All too often we glance over a document and fire off a quick answer that misses the point, which does more harm than good. So take the time to read things carefully – it may mean a few extra minutes spent but it’s well worth it. 

Paradoxical, but true: to write well you have to read well.

Iain Duncan Smith sparked a flurry of tweets recently when he allegedly went on record as saying that ‘work makes you free’. I say allegedly, because no one can actually tell you when and where he said it – that’s the way of social media sometimes. I didn’t hear it myself because I was… working at the time. 

I’m being flippant, but of course the main reason this caused such a rumpus is not because people objected to IDS’ apparent insult to people on benefits – although they did in droves. It’s because the phrase has an altogether more sinister connotation that few people, much less the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, could be unaware of – Nazism. 

Here at the lorries we see a lot of unfortunate and inappropriate phrasing on a daily basis, but nothing quite on this scale. In fact it’s hard to imagine a subject area higher up on anyone’s ‘avoid’ list, especially someone whose every word is likely to reach a large audience. 

If you’re feeling charitable, you can see what he was probably getting at – that good, honest toil has an ennobling effect on people. In fact, a phrase roughly translatable as ‘Work makes you free’ was well known in a number of languages long before the Nazis adopted it and tainted it for good. 

But that’s the point. Whether he used the exact phrase or not, and whatever he meant if he did, this is a reminder of the power of branding and association in language – and that some words just can’t be reclaimed.

…is big business. With the enormous amount of information we’re exposed to in today’s digital world, just to keep our heads above water we have to take in more, and do it more quickly.

There are dozens of speed-reading courses across the UK – and it’s big business in the US. People are even developing online technology that flashes words at you on screen to make you read at a certain pace, as John Walsh has discussed in The Independent.

But there’s a growing concern among neurologists and other researchers that our constant multi-tasking (we’ve all been there: trying to email, talk on the phone and finish off a report at the same time) is taking its toll on our concentration and attention span. In other words, we may be taking in more, but our grasp of it isn’t always great.

Sound familiar? How many times have you glanced through an email and missed a vital piece of information? Or skimmed through a customer letter and missed a key point? Sacrificing thoroughness for speed can cause all sorts of headaches down the line.

But the main problem I have with speed-reading is that it requires you to take in whole chunks of information at a glance instead of reading from the start to finish of sentences. And in doing this you completely miss the sound and rhythm of the words.

This makes it impossible to pick up on tone or to appreciate the poetry of something that’s particularly well written. It’s the equivalent of stuffing as much food down your throat as you can in five minutes, instead of taking it one mouthful at a time and tasting each bite.

It may sound like an oxymoron, but life’s just too short to speed read.

Update: In July The Guardian published an article on the Slow Reading Movement saying, among other things, that we’re losing our ability to read entire articles and even books because of how we ‘read’ online.

There’s been a rumble of discontent in recent years about people overusing exclamation marks. As Stuart Jeffries says in his article in the Guardian, it’s become a favourite flourish of people of a certain age and gender, especially in quick electronic communications. Yes, apparently women are more ‘exclamation-mark happy’ than men because they’re friendlier. If you’re intrigued by this idea, you might want to have a look at his article.

Here at the Lorries, we too have noticed a rather excited use of exclamation marks in the business world, particularly in sales and internal comms – newsletters, emails and the like. It’s something we tend to discourage, unless we’re working with a company whose tone of voice is that of an excited teenager (and we haven’t come across one yet).

You may want to come across as friendly when you write to colleagues and customers, but using exclamation marks is a clumsy way to do it. Here’s why.

Stuart Jeffries goes into the history of exclamation marks in some detail in his article, but essentially they direct the reader to inject some emotion into whatever comes before them. Like all punctuation, they show us how to read things. So they’re used with exclamations like Wow! or Ouch! or Go away!

When things start to go wrong is when people tag them on to the end of sentences or phrases to put energy into lifeless words. This can easily sound as if the writer is trying a bit too hard to gloss up something that’s not particularly exciting.

Poorly used exclamation marks can give text a slightly hysterical tone – a bit like a frazzled dinner party hostess trying desperately to keep things light and pleasant when someone’s just left the table in floods of tears.

Our advice – let your words speak for themselves. A quiet, calm voice will hold people’s attention much more effectively than one that shouts and waves about.

So the next time you find yourself going for the exclamation key, try it without. You’ll sound more measured – and most likely more confident too – without adding what Lynn Truss in Eats, Shoots & Leaves calls a screamer, a gasper and other terms to colourful (ahem!) to mention here.

The rules of grammar: a dream for some and a nightmare for others. It’s a bit unfair, really – if you’re not a maths person, just don’t get a job as a physicist and you can probably get by with eight fingers, two thumbs and a phone calculator. But if you’re not a grammar person, you have to run the gauntlet of judgement pretty much every darned day of your life.

There’s even a Facebook group called I judge you when you use poor grammar with nearly 400,000 members. In fact, pretty much everyone falls into one of these categories: 

The sticklers. An elitist faction who know their apostrophes like the back of their hand. An organised bunch, they subscribe devoutly to the status quo and cast a disapproving eye upon the flawed offerings of dissidents. Rallying cry: ‘You’re either with us, or you’re… a bit thick.’ 

The shirkers. Shirkers may know how grammar works, but they’ve got better things to do than watch their infinitives, thank you very much. And as it happens, grammar rules should describe the language as it’s used, not be handed down from on high, OK? Rallying cry: If it ain’t broke, sod off and stop correcting me. 

And don’t think you can sit on the fence either. Nobody says ‘There ain’t nothing worse than bad grammar.’ But of course that’s partly down to wanting to avoid the inevitable response: ‘Ha! That means there is something worse than bad grammar!’ Yep, if you’re a shirker you just can’t shake those sticklers. 

Historically, this may be a little unfair. After all, grammar is based more on convention than mathematical logic. Up until the eighteenth century, for example, double negatives were the norm – and nobody challenged Chaucer when he wrote He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde (loosely translated as he’s never yet not spoken no villainy) in The Canterbury Tales. 

Grammatical rules were chosen arbitrarily. Or rather, they firmly codified the arbitrary speaking habits of the economically powerful of the time. So the shirkers could have been the sticklers in a different age, place, surname. 

So what can the shirkers do to fight back? They’re already forced to adopt an alien dialect on paper if they want to make it in business, rather like the left-handed Victorian children who had their little mitt tied behind their back until they learned to ‘write right’. 

I’m in the unfortunate position of being a stickler who likes an underdog. What am I supposed to do?! I’m off to start an ‘I judge you when you judge me for using poor grammar’ group, that’s what. 

Well, it’s fun to argue, innit?

First man on the moon Neil Armstrong must have been ruminating on the two-faced nature of technology recently. On the one hand, it got him safely to the moon and back. But 40 years after his historic broadcast from the moon’s surface, a couple of boffins used it to prove that he’d fluffed his lines while he was there.

What Armstrong had – by his own admission – meant to say on exiting the Lunar Module was ‘One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’ But using sophisticated recording analysis equipment, the two – a forensic linguist and a science writer and broadcaster – established that, as every pedant has known all along, he’d missed out the ‘a’ and had, in fact, made no sense whatsoever.

It must have been the last straw for a man who, ever since the Apollo 11 mission, has been plagued by doubters and conspiracy theorists at one end of the spectrum, and obsessive space fans at the other – as recently as 2005, he sued his barber for selling his hair.

You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for Armstrong. After all, he had rather a lot on his mind at the time, such as the small matter of getting back to Earth. And summing up the experience for the first global TV audience worthy of the name is not something you get another go at. Especially as the lunar project was booted into the very, very long grass just three years later – and has stayed there ever since.

All of which puts our gaffes and typos as writers in perspective. While it’s highly unlikely anyone will be poring over our words 40 years from now, we do at least have every chance to make sure our sentences stand up to scrutiny if they do. So next time you groan at the prospect of checking something you’ve written, remember Neil Armstrong and be glad of the opportunity.

Another year gone, more examples of toe-curlingly bad English. Once again, December’s ‘winners’ of the Plain English Golden Bull Awards went to show that many people still aren’t getting the message about clear, concise writing. As a result, their poor readers just aren’t getting the message full stop.

The ‘Foot In Mouth’ award went to Lord Mandelson for his unusually roundabout interpretation of the expenses scandal. The Daily Telegraph, of course, was only too happy to treat this as headline news, but it’s hard not to feel that Mandy was a little hard done by: in unscripted, spoken language, who doesn’t let a metaphor run away with them now and again? And at least he wasn’t bogging us down with jargon.

Which is more than you can say for the written entries. On top of the pseudo-tech-speak, just about every other no-no in the book is represented here, from clunky new verbs (‘arrive me’) and jungle-dense legalese to messages gone AWOL and spectacularly muddled thinking.

These examples, apart from American Airlines’ jaw-droppingly euphemistic ‘property irregularity receipt’, have two main things in common. Firstly, they are much, much longer than they need to be to deliver the message. Secondly, they show the writer’s complete detachment from his or her reader – they’ve lost sight of both who and what they’re writing for.

Above all, these shockers are a reminder of the importance of being clear about what you want to say, and saying it as simply as you can.

In the inimitable words of Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) ‘I like to verb words. I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when “access” was a thing? Now it’s something you do. It got verbed. Verbing weirds language.’

Over the past few years, verbing (or verbification) has become big news. Not so big that my spell check accepts either of these as valid terms, but still a source of some debate among observers of the language. The terms describe a functional shift of a noun or adjective into a verb, and indeed the verbs ‘verbing’ and ‘to verbify’ are examples of the process. 

But this is causing some unrest among the purists, who feel that people are starting to trendily bounce new verbs about willy-nilly. This type of language gets many people’s backs up, as Lucy Kellaway makes clear in her recent article on ‘management guff’ in the Financial Times. In this way of thinking, the students who casually yell ‘beer me’ when they want a drink are part of a new, dangerously lazy breed of English speakers. It’s alienating language users, argue some, and adding to the ever-increasing corruption of our native tongue. 

But can there really be such thing as a language purist? Verbification has been happening for centuries; it just followed an evolutionary pace and nobody really noticed. How else would you say you were going to water the flowers, for example? Or microwave dinner? Originally, you may have been going to pour water on the flowers or cook your dinner in the microwave, but now that sounds long-winded and redundant. 

Even politicians are jumping on the verbing bandwagon. When they ‘sex up a dossier’ they’re not only making the document itself more attractive to their media-savvy public, they’re being trendy with their language too. 

The main issue seems to be that nouns and adjectives are now being ‘verbed’ at an ever-increasing rate – and as Calvin and Hobbes demonstrate above, it can start to get confusing. In the built-for-purpose language Esperanto, you can turn any word into a verb simply by adding the necessary suffix and that works fine. 

But in an organic language like English, with a different and more complex set of rules and conventions, verbification is more a reflection of the times. As new products and technology gain momentum, people need a way to refer to it. So we’ll access our inbox, email our boss and then tweet one more time before going home. 

In other words, we’re walking the walk, so we need to talk the talk.