Introduction
Welcome to the first issue of Red Pony Express, a bi-monthly newsletter of ideas to help you create more effective business and technical communications materials as well as solving some of the irritating little grammatical problems we’re faced with every day.
In this first issue we show you how case studies can help you establish your credentials with clients and prospects, leading to higher conversions and increased revenues. We also start a series examining common problems in language use. Today, ending a sentence on a preposition. Our next issue, in April, will look at Microsoft Word templates and how you can use them to save time and dramatically improve the appearance of your documents.
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Regards,
Peter Riches
Principal Consultant, Red Pony
The Case for Case Studies
It's always good to focus on the wide road ahead in a business enterprise—optimism is the engine of progress.
But make sure you also keep an eye on the rear-vision mirror. Where have you been and what were the lessons you learned from the experience—positive and negative? Your clients and customers will be looking for this information too. They know that the best indicator of your future performance is your past performance.
That's why a selection of case studies can be a very valuable addition to your website or suite of marketing materials. If you can assemble a small collection of articles that outline the nature of the problem or task presented by a past client and describe how you devised a successful solution, then you're more than halfway to winning the confidence of a prospective client.
Set yourself a private task at the end of each major project to write an honest, frank account of everything that went right or wrong and how any problems might be averted next time round. Often you find that the problem will only crystallise once you put pen to paper (or fingers to the keyboard). Once you write down the story, you'll have something like a shipping chart that identifies the shallows or submerged objects that weren't visible on the surface.
And for the projects that turned out well? You've got a perfect advertisement for yourself and your business—ready to go out to the wider public. Always remember to seek the permission of clients before you mention them or their business in your advertising. If the client is happy to provide a testimonial quote, so much the better.
Ending a Sentence on a Preposition
An ancient piece of nursery grammar states that one should never end a sentence on a preposition.
It's called a PREposition after all. And if it's 'pre' (or 'before') then it should have something after it, shouldn't it?
Well, shouldn't it?
This rule can be traced back to a problem that we'll come across again in these newsletters: the desire of English grammarians to apply the (admittedly very elegant) template of Latin grammar onto messy old English, with its mongrel Germanic/Anglo-Saxon/Norman roots and influences.
The grammatical rule is a bit of a cover for the deeper reason: seeking to forbid utterances that sounded, as they used to say in the olden days, 'coarse' or 'common' . So, instead of a straightforward question such as: 'Who are you going to the pub with?' the uncouth speaker would be corrected thus: 'With whom are you going to the pub?'
Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?
Sir Winston Churchill—a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, by the way—supposedly knocked this grammatical prescription into a cocked hat with his rejoinder to an overzealous editor who had clumsily corrected a sentence of Churchill's that ended on a preposition: 'This is the kind of English up with which I will not put.'
But the rule can be helpful when faced with a car crash of a sentence such as this, from a father telling his son to fetch a favourite bedtime story: 'Go and get the book you want to be read to out of.' Sometimes it's just better to rewrite (and rethink) the whole thing.
The benefit of most grammatical rules is in getting us to slow down and think about what we are actually trying to say to our audience and how best that message might be conveyed.
Or how it might be conveyed best.
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