> It's business English which has its own subset of rules. > Normally, in > business English -- formal letters, etc., punctuation always > goes inside the end > quote. Not the way I grew up doing it, but then they change > the rules all the > time. So I am pretty careful to do it that way now. > > Marnie :-)
Really, Marnie, the business world is the last place to go to for advice on English. The very term 'business English' is an oxymoron. Business language is to thinking as foam extinguishers are to flames. Here's a winner of the Plain English Campaign's Golden Bull award for 2008: Balfour Beatty half-year update 2008 'Our goal at Balfour Beatty is to deliver consistent, long-term growth to our shareholders. We do this by striving to remain or become the leading provider of high-quality, customer critical infrastructure in each of our markets. By becoming the partner of choice to sophisticated owners in our chosen disciplines and geographies, we believe we will achieve secure, industry best margins in our contracting activities and substantial, sustainable equity returns from our long-term investment portfolio.' Here is a good example of plain English: "Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket" --- George Orwell -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
