The Platinum Award winner was PA Consulting, for its work with the Ministry of Defence to improve protection against explosive devices, which is now saving lives in Afghanistan.

Emphasis sponsored the Customer Engagement award, which went to Transform (pictured here with Emphasis CEO Rob Ashton), for its work with Argos. Transform gave the high-street retailer a new strategy that brought it closer to its customers through texts and its own TV channel.

We were delighted to entertain guests from Boxwood, Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton, Marks & Spencer and Nabarro at our table, and look forward to seeing you all again soon.

For the full list of winners, click here.

While it’s OK to tweak trademarks slightly to bring them into line with standard English (for example More Than, rather than MORE TH>N), it’s not OK to use a trademarked name to describe a product not made by that company.

In some cases, the horse has already bolted – ‘Hoover’ is now almost synonymous with ‘vacuum cleaner’, for example, regardless of the brand. But use ‘Thermos’ to describe a vacuum flask not made by Thermos and you’re on dodgy ground.

Take our quiz to see how trademark-aware you are. For each item, decide whether it’s a current trademark, a lapsed trademark or a red herring. To make it more difficult, we’ve written them all with an initial capital.

After you submit your answers, you’ll get an explanation of each one.

How did you do? Let us know below, and if you know of any other trademark trivia, please share.

<<Read the May 2012 e-bulletin

Emphasis CEO Rob Ashton will be giving a talk at 11.45 on Thursday 26 April and demonstrating his sentence supercharger technique. Come along and find out how to supercharge any sentence in 60 seconds, giving yourself a huge tactical advantage when it comes to getting your message across. It’s a great opportunity to experience a key part of the acclaimed High-impact business writing course.

Director Tom Wilde and Development Manager Jenny Ferguson will also be there, on stand 631. You can pre-book an appointment through our exhibitor profile and order your free copy of our style guide The Write Stuff for collection. Or just come and say hello.

The HRD conference will take place on 25-26 April, at Olympia in London. Click here for tickets.

Last year, management consultants Navigant scooped the Customer Engagement Award for their work with Skandia investment managers. This year, the shortlist for the award comprises: Ernst & Young, for their work with BMW; IBM with Nationwide; LOC Consulting with Truvo; Propaganda with Clipper Logistics; and Transform with Argos. All the companies on the shortlist have achieved great things this year and we wish them the best of luck.

We’ll be there on the night, and Emphasis Chief Executive Rob Ashton will be presenting this year’s Customer Engagement Award. As well as Rob, Director Tom Wilde and Development Manager Jenny Ferguson will be attending. Please do come and say hello, whether to talk about how we can help your company or just to put names to faces. We’ll be reporting on the night, so it’s also your chance to tell us your latest news.

The MCA Awards will be held on Thursday 19 April at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, London. For more information, and to see the companies shortlisted in other categories, click here.

Altogether can mean entirely, utterly or completely; on the whole; or with everything included:
That’s a different point altogether.
Altogether the meeting was a success.
You owe £500 altogether.

All together means in or as a group (a physical or conceptual one), collectively; or in one place:
Let’s sing our office theme song: all together now!
Once everyone’s ideas were in, we were able to bring it all together.
We’re all together in this.

A good way to test which version you want is to see if you can put another word (or words) between the all and the together.

Are we altogether convinced we’re all in this together?

Now that’s clear, take a moment to enjoy what, surely, is the best example of people altogether confused over which is which.

<<Read the May 2012 e-bulletin

55 minutes

Fed up with email? Learn how to ditch it altogether from special guest Luis Suarez.  He relies almost exclusively on social media for business communication, despite having a senior role in IBM and living in the Canary Islands.

Plus: soon you really will be able to work and walk at the same time, as Google announces a heads-up display for all; and a gun that shuts people up. It’s all in the latest Communication Lab podcast.

Further reading

Hear something you want to know more about? Here are some useful links.

Luis blogs at elsua.net and you can watch the video he mentions at outsidetheinbox.eu.

The three main social media he uses are:

• IBM connections for internal company communications
• Twitter for immediacy
• Google+ for in-depth conversations and brainstorming

Here are some links to the article on Atos chief executive Thierry Breton’s ban on internal email, a piece in The Atlantic on the evolution of email, and a mini-review of Fluent by Lifehacker.

If you too are feeling the iPad love, check out this article on how it is accelerating the move away from printing. And for fun, here are the heads-up glasses and the silencing gun.

We’d love to hear what you thought of Luis’s recommendations about moving away from email. If you decide to adopt any of his practices, why not tweet him (@elsua), Rob (@Robert_Ashton), Andy (@doctorpod) and Emphasis (@EmphasisWriting), using the hashtag #lawwe and let us know how you get on?

<<Read the April 2012 e-bulletin

It would be considered crass – and more than a little odd – for a native English speaker speaking to another native English speaker to switch to another language mid-sentence. So why do some people think it’s acceptable to do so with Latin?

To be effective, writing needs to be clear and accessible. It shouldn’t confuse the reader or require them to reach for a dictionary. In fact, when someone has to look away for long enough to look up a word, they may never return.

Only a minority of native English speakers have any formal knowledge of Latin. In the UK in 2011, just 9,650 pupils out of a total of 5.15 million took a Latin GCSE. That’s less than two per cent. Admittedly, that proportion was slightly higher when your average businessperson was at school, but the fact remains that the moment you slip in a line of Latin, or even over-pepper a sentence with post, ad hoc and per se, whether it’s apropos (appropriate) or not, you risk alienating the majority of your readership.

There are some professions – medicine and law, for example – where Latin is a crucial part of the language (although lawyer Wayne Schiess makes a good case against using unnecessary Latin in legal writing). But outside of those professions, there are few cases where using an expression that your readers may not understand would be better than writing it in plain English.

This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with studying or taking an interest in Latin – after all, much of our language is based on it. And it’s fine to use commonly understood abbreviations such as eg, ie, etc, if they’re genuinely more appropriate than for example, that is, and and so on. Just make sure you use them correctly.

Latin on the loose

We’ve rounded up five examples of Latin obstructing meaning, below. If you’re not familiar with the Latin terms, hover over them for a rough translation, or click to see the full definition.

Here’s Kathy Gyngell blogging for the Daily Mail:
‘This is what the Bishops’ amendment to exclude child benefit from Iain Duncan Smith’s benefit cap plan, inter alia, endorses – the continuation of entitlement.’

A paper from the Social Development Agency:
‘This Vademecum is intended as a handy reference guide to using budget heading 04.03.03.03. on information, consultation and participation of representatives within undertakings.’

A Wired.com article on the rules of cooking:
‘While there are certainly still subjective and somewhat impenetrable qualities to one’s cuisine — de gustibus non est disputandum — there is an increasing rigor in the kitchen.’

An article on robo-cars:
‘And given the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on police use of GPS, even when tracking criminals, the idea that more technology in the car leads ipso facto to more government control is questionable.’

And, making a case for the teaching of Latin in schools, Boris Johnson writing in the Telegraph:
‘Suppose you are captured by cannibals in the Mato Grosso, and you find a scrap of Portuguese newspaper in your hut revealing that there is about to be an eclipse; and suppose that by successfully prophesying this event you convince your captors that you are a god and secure your release – I reckon you would be thankful for your Latin, eh?  And even if you reject any such practical advantages (and, experto crede, they are huge), I don’t care, because they are not the point.’

How many of them could you follow, without checking the definitions?

With the possible exception of Boris Johnson, whose Latin is at least relevant to the subject in hand, these are all quite bizarre language choices. In the first case, ‘among other things’ would have been a much better and clearer expression than inter alia.

In the second, the use of Vademecum (or vade mecum, as it is more commonly spelt) alongside ‘handy reference guide’ is tautologous. It essentially says ‘this handy reference guide is intended as a handy reference guide’.

In the third, what purpose could there be for writing in Latin, other than for the writer to show that he can? And in the fourth, the ipso facto is unnecessary – if any clarification is needed, ‘automatically’ or ‘directly’ would do fine.

The case against

While studying Latin is admirable, using it in everyday language isn’t. Not only does it sound pompous and offputting, it obstructs communication. Even Boris doesn’t make an argument for actually using it, merely for knowing it in case of encounters with cannibals who can’t read newspapers.

When writing, always keep your readers at the front of your mind. What do they need to know, and how can you best communicate it? If the answer to the second question is ‘in Latin’, then by all means go ahead – but those occasions are, we suspect, rare.

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you spotted some Latin on the loose? Can you defend any of the above examples? Do you have a particular phrase that you’re fond of dropping into writing? Leave us a comment below.

<<Read the March 2012 e-bulletin

32 minutes

Listen now to the latest programme, featuring linguistics expert Dr Lynne Murphy talking about the differences between UK and US English.

Further reading

Hear something you want to know more about? Here are some useful links.

Check out Lynne’s excellent blog Separated by a Common Language (and here’s how to spell ‘woa/whoa/woah’). You can also follow Lynne on Twitter @lynneguist.

Our post on giraffe bread tells how the tiger changed its stripes.

Rob got five, Lynne got seven – see how well you do in our new dictionary words quiz.

Meet the mucus troopers and the adultescents in Collins’ 2004 attempt to create a Living Dictionary.

If you too think that there’s a lot to be said for learning a word a day, try following @wordoftheday on Twitter.

Finally, if you’d like to keep track of those pesky Britishisms in American English, see Ben Yagoda’s blog Not One-Off Britishisms.

<<Read the March 2012 e-bulletin

The real story isn’t quite so magical as that sounds. But Sainsbury’s response to a letter from a little girl, which has now led them to change the name of their tiger bread to giraffe bread, was certainly inspired.

For those who missed it, the UK supermarket received a letter last May questioning the name of the pattern-crusted loaf: why call it ‘tiger’ when it was clearly not stripy? ‘It should be called giraffe bread’, the letter went on. ‘Love from Lily Robinson age 3½.’

What’s more, as of 31 January, it is – at least for now. A victory that may be for Lily (who actually ‘hasn’t got much time for’ the story, according to her mother’s blog, where the letters appeared). But it’s Sainsbury’s reputation that’s the real winner, as the story has become an internet sensation. And it’s all thanks to the well-judged and endearing reply that customer-service manager Chris King (age 27⅓) sent.

‘Thanks so much for your letter,’ he wrote. ‘I think renaming tiger bread giraffe bread is a brilliant idea – it looks much more like the blotches on a giraffe than the stripes on a tiger, doesn’t it?

‘It is called tiger bread because the first baker who made it a looong time ago thought it looked stripey like a tiger. Maybe they were a bit silly.’

You’d also have to be pretty silly not to realise the power of social media now has over public opinion. (More than four thousand people Like the Chris King from Sainsbury’s is a legend Facebook page at the time of writing.)

Customer-service representatives probably spend most of their time appeasing angry and outraged letter-writers. But this is a great reminder that you can generate a lot of good feeling by making time for the sweet and silly correspondence too. That’s how you’ll really earn your stripes.

If you’re in the customer-service field, you might also like our article on how to make the most of positive correspondence: Now you’re talking my language.

So why not do the same for the words and terms that entered our lives – or at least the dictionaries – in 2011?* You can make your own mind up about which of those categories these words fall into, but – more to the point – can you pick the correct definition for each from the choices below?

Let us know how you got on. Have you used any of the terms? (We’ve already heard from a keen cricketer about an alternative meaning for one of them.) If not, will you be adding any of them to your vocabulary? And which ones (if any) are you hoping to forget long before the year is out?

* Words taken from 2011 entries in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Concise Oxford English Dictionary and Collins English Dictionary

And if that’s put you in a quizzing mood, why not pit yourself against our fiendish spelling test?

<<Read the February 2012 e-bulletin