Introduction
Welcome to the first instalment of the Red Pony Express for 2010. This month marks a transition for Red Pony, from our Queen St environs to the old world splendour of the Block Arcade at 282 Collins St (4th floor). We will henceforth be editing from our eyrie above Melbourne’s finest boutiques and coffee emporia. Our phone and email contact details remain unchanged, although we have a new postal address: GPO Box 2299, Melbourne VIC 3001.
In this edition we explore the promotional opportunities presented by industry awards, we examine the rules for using punctuation’s second most popular mark, the comma, and we take a trip one thousand years down memory lane to the Norman conquest of England.
Regards,
Andrew Eather
Senior Consultant, Red Pony
Using industry awards for a PR boost
Peter Riches
Have you ever considered entering your organisation for an industry award? If not, you may be missing out on a golden opportunity for some excellent free publicity.
Many industry bodies hold some form of annual award to provide recognition to their members as well as promoting the industry itself. Submitting an entry gives you a chance to highlight the qualities and performance of your organisation.
If you do something well, it’s worth letting prospects and clients know. Being shortlisted for an award demonstrates that you’re at the top of your field and acknowledged by your peers. Should you win, you have established a great differentiator between you and your competitors.
There are also non-industry specific awards such as the Australian Business Awards to honour business leaders or the Safe Work Australia Awards recognising excellence in occupational health and safety on a national level. On a smaller scale, local councils will often have a range of annual awards to recognise exemplary businesses within their municipality.
If there’s a formal function for the presentation of the awards (and there often will be) it’s a great occasion for meeting other entrants, not to mention a chance to dress up and tread the red carpet for a night.
The comma
Andrew Eather
Most writers can be divided neatly into two camps: those who use too many commas and those who do not use enough. I use too many.
The result in both cases is confusion. This is ironic, because confusion is just what our curly little friend is intended to avoid.
There’s an almost limitless range of conditional prescriptions to dictate comma usage, but I’ve boiled them down to a few of the most useful.
Use a comma to:
- separate items in a list (‘Remember to bring shoes, shorts and socks.’)
- mark off non-defining clauses or phrases (A defining clause contains information that is integral to the subject of the sentence. A non-defining clause contains information that isn’t.) ‘All the players, who are now recovering in hospital, deny involvement in the hotel incident.’ (Consider how the meaning of this sentence would change with the commas removed.)
- eliminate possible ambiguity (‘He was not run over, mercifully.’)
- mark off parenthetic expressions (‘In the meantime, despite the continuing discussions, disaster was becoming inevitable.’).
Note that the Americans would include a comma after ‘shorts’ in the first example above. I would too, as I think it’s more logical. Australian style guides, however, feel differently, so it’s tough luck for me.
As the above paragraph demonstrates, there are plenty of instances where there can be no solid justification for or against the use of a comma – it’s just a matter of personal taste. In this respect, the comma represents a rare opportunity in the drab field of punctuation for the author to cavort as proudly as a peacock, displaying the brightly coloured plumage of his or her personality for the delectation of the reader. So let yourself go.
What have the French ever done for us?
Andrew Eather
In 1066 the invading Norman French arrived at Hastings, on the southern coast of England. After a short battle, they took over the whole country. Subsequent attempts to replicate this feat by Senor Philip of Spain and Herr Hitler of Germany came to naught.
We might speculate that some of the doughty, resolute spirit that has repelled other invaders for close to a millennium derives from the intermingling of the nuanced and sophisticated character of Norman French with the blunt and direct monosyllabism of Anglo-Saxon.
What we can say with a fair measure of certainty is that French brought with it a dose of class consciousness that’s never really left the English language. This is unsurprising when you consider that the invaders simply made French the official language of Church, Law and State. Any social advancement would therefore have to be done in French.
To this day, the simplicity and sturdiness of Anglo-Saxon words are often neglected in favour of their more elaborate French/Latinate cognates (see? I do it all the time). If you detect a pretentious note in your writing, the culprit will often be a long word that sneaked in from France.
The class consciousness is more obvious when you think of words like ‘villain’, which is derived from ‘villein’ – a French word for ‘villager’ that now describes a shady character best avoided, which was clearly the opinion of the conquering French nobility towards their grubby English underlings.
Over time the origins of such words become obscured, but it’s instructive to remember that loaded terminology extends back a lot further than the dawn of the age of ‘political correctness’ in the 1980s.
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