Bob W wrote:
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.'
Sadly, it seems to be gone but there used to be a "Mission Statement Generator" on the Dilbert.com web site. It would string together random buzzwords and "managementese" phrases and spit out... well, basically material that was indistinguishable from the above.
With regards to punctuation, there's a trend in the States toward what I've heard called "logical punctuation". That is, if the closing punctuation makes more sense inside the quotation marks, that's where you put it (He asked, "Where is my Chicago Manual of Style?") and if the punctuation make makes more sense outside the quotation marks you put it there (Has anyone ever uttered the phrase, "Please hand me that piano"?)
It's so reasonable I'm sure it doesn't stand a chance of catching on... -- 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.
