20 questions you must ask yourself before you hit the "Send" button

"The spelling in e-mail is rotten, the grammar is atrocious, the punctuation — don't ask. No wonder people who love language are wringing their hands and saying the computer has been a disaster for the written word."

Truer words were never spoken.

To help us fix our e-mail bloopers, language mavens Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman, whose quote appears above, wrote a book which was published as far back as — would you believe it? — 2003. Eight years on, the points made in You Send Me: Getting It Right When You Write Online are still valid.

CAN YOU FIGURE OUT WHICH PUNCTUATION MARKS ARE MISSING?

Now, to test your e-mail IQ, Grammarphobia.com has put together 20 questions, based on O'Conner and Kellerman's book, that you should ask yourself before you hit "Send". All 20 questions — and explanations — are available here. The ones I found particularly helpful are given below:

1. Is the subject line helpful?

2. Is the language clear?

3. Did you say what you're replying to?

4. Did you break for paragraphs?

5. Did you read it again?

6. Did you check the grammar, spelling, and punctuation?

Simple, practical, and easy-to-apply advice. Why didn't we think of it ourselves?

• Patricia T. O'Conner has also written a bestselling grammar book, Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English. This book, as well as You Send Me, is available on Flipkart.

• Illustration courtesy: HootSuite. 

UPDATE (January 6, 2014): "Use lowercase type with capitals where capitals are called for. Lowercase is easier to read than all caps, but don’t go to extremes and omit capitals altogether. Friends may not mind, but a business colleague may interpret lack of capitalisation as evidence of lack of education or energy." — Some helpful advice from Maeve Maddox on the excellent Daily Writing Tips blog. Read the post in its entirety here: "E-mail Matters".

• ALSO READ: "Want To Be Taken Seriously? Become a Better Writer" 

UPDATE (January 9, 2014):  Can spelling mistakes and bad e-mail etiquette help you get ahead? Yes, says Kevin Roose, in a column he wrote on his blog (and which I spotted when I logged on to my LinkedIn account today). Roose uses the example of the e-mail sent to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by Snapchat's Evan Spiegel to elaborate on the subject. Read his post here: "How Spelling Mistakes and Bad E-mail Etiquette Can Help You Get Ahead".

Meet ad executive Swapan Seth, the man who buys a book every day

SWAPAN SETH

Swapan Seth is a man after my own heart.

The chief executive of Equus, the ad agency, and author of This Is All I Have to Say writes in the latest issue of Businessworld that he buys a book every day. "I buy most of my books online," Seth writes. "From Amazon, and now Flipkart."

What does he read?

Everything. ... I also speed read. That allows me to wrap up books pretty fast. And I read three of them simultaneously. Currently, I am reading about smiles, shoes and one book on the state of America. I also read on the strangest of topics — pineapples, salt, wine and wisdom. Even pronouns. And genes.

The strange thing is that Seth came to books late:

For most part of my life, I was just not a book person. The only thing I would read about was the Royal Family of England. So I would go to the British Council and read whatever there was to know about them. To that end, I know more about Queen Elizabeth than, perhaps, Prince Charles does.

It was only at age 33, Seth writes, when he visited a friend at home, a friend whose house was just filled with books, that he lost his heart to books:

I was mesmerised. [Books] served as tables. They worked as stools. The smell of paper was captivating. I lost my heart to books courtesy [Kaustav Neogi] and his infinitely inspiring home. All that I have rigorously read has been read over this past decade.

Seth has his quirks. For instance, he says he does not read fiction. He also "stays away from Indian authors as far as possible", only reading M.J. Akbar and Tarun Tejpal because "they both make me feel like a worm. And I like that". And Seth never reads in bed (one of my favourite places to read).

But for all that Swapan Seth is a man to admire and a role model for many youngsters who have not yet learned to appreciate the uncountable benefits of reading. The message to be taken to heart here, perhaps, from a man after my own heart is that it is never too late to develop an interest in reading.

• Photo courtesy: Businessworld

• Also read: "Why you must read".

• ADDITIONAL READING: "In one year she succeeded in reading one book from every country in the world". 

• UPDATE (May 14, 2013): Yesterday Flipkart delivered a copy of Swapan Seth's book, This Is All I Have to Say. It will be placed in the Commits library ASAP.

What does a production designer do?

WASIQ KHAN

If he's Wasiq Khan, he pulls off the improbable, writes Sunaina Kumar in the latest Tehelka.

And how does he do that?

In Dabbang, it was Wasiq Khan who was responsible for "the sepia tints, the rustic colours and the stylised yet authentic sets of the film". In Anurag Kashyap’s That Girl in Yellow Boots, for which he had only two days to prepare, Khan set up "a cramped apartment with peeling walls, a crummy massage parlour, and a BEST bus".

He got his start in production design with Kashyap’s short film Last Train to Mahakali and though he has had some stupendous successes in commercial Hindi cinema, his speciality, he says, is in conjuring up the grime and sweat of reality.

“It is certainly the work I find most challenging and rewarding. It is also the toughest to shoot,” he says. He gives examples from Aamir and Black Friday. In Aamir "there was a scene where Rajeev Khandelwal had to enter a filthy slum toilet. He puked on the sets and I had to reassure him that this is only a set and nothing is real. In Black Friday, for the bomb blast sequence, instead of junior artists, I got disfigured beggars from Haji Ali, and got them fitted with artificial limbs for the before-and-after scenes.”

Curiously, Wasiq Khan says he never uses design software for his work, so he sketches every frame by hand. For Dabbang, he says, he created more than a hundred sketches.

•  Read the article in its entirety here: "My fake slum toilet made people puke".

• Also read: "Dabbang — Plenty of bang for your buck".

• Photo: Courtesy Tehelka

Tell me, please: What role has reading played in your life?

Dr. Mardy Grothe is a phenomenon. A psychologist by training, he is an author and, as his website puts it, an engaging and entertaining speaker who gives scores of seminars every year to CEO groups that are part of an international network known as The Executive Committee (TEC).

I connected with him last April after reading his book Viva La Repartee, subtitled "Clever comebacks and witty retorts from history's great wits and wordsmiths". We had an engaging, entertaining, and enlightening e-mail conversation, which later formed the basis of a Reading Room post: "It all depends on the telling, sure. But surely who does the telling matters?"

Soon afterwards, Dr. Grothe added my name to his mailing list — now every Saturday I receive an e-mail from the good doctor with the subject line "Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week".

When I checked my e-mail this morning, this was waiting for me in my in-box:

"WHAT ROLE HAS READING PLAYED IN YOUR LIFE?"

DR. MARDY GROTHE

When I was a young boy growing up in North Dakota [USA], I took to reading very early, and my mother, an eighth-grade graduate and an avid reader, did everything she could to encourage me. When the library bookmobile made its weekly visit to our small town, mom always came home with an armful of books. I would quickly make my way through the ones she chose for me, and then move on to the ones she selected for herself. I'll always be grateful for her role in establishing what has become one of my greatest joys.

The quotations below are a testament to the importance of reading, especially when it is developed at an early age. No matter what your age, though, reading is one of the keys to a meaningful life. Over the years, I have collected well over a hundred quotations on the value or importance of reading. This week, I feature a dozen of my favourite observations on the subject:

      "Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life."
             Mortimer J. Adler

  "The reading of all good books is like conversation
   with the finest men of the past centuries."
         Rene Descartes

      "Who would call a day spent reading a good day?
       But a life spent reading — that is a good life."
             Annie Dillard

  "There is creative reading as well as creative writing."
         Ralph Waldo Emerson

      "My early and invincible love of reading
       I would not exchange for all the riches of India."
             Edward Gibbon

  "To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company."
         Andre Gide

      "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life."
             W. Somerset Maugham

  "No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting."
         Mary Wortley Montagu

      "I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage."
             Charles de Montesquieu

  "Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head
   instead of with one's own."
         Arthur Schopenhauer

      "Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."
             Richard Steele

  "How many a man has dated a new era in his life
   from the reading of a book!"
         Henry David Thoreau

Thank you, Dr. Mardy, for renewing my faith in the belief that you are what you read.

Also read:

• Why you must read

• David Ogilvy on why reading is important

• If you don't read, you can't write

• The amazing books that made me fall in love with journalism all over again - 1

• The amazing books that made me fall in love with journalism all over again - 2

• What to read

• If you're a book-lover...

• (March 6, 2011) Commitscion Padmini Nandy Mazumder, Class of 2011, shared this link on her Facebook wall: "Date a girl who reads". It is a beautifully articulated argument in favour of reading. So read it. Please.

Mistakes that annoy readers

Among other things:

I think my favourite correction from the past 12 months apologised for the paper praising a whisky as "a genuine classic which never fails to disappoint" — so wrong it looks right.

This excerpt from a column written by the Readers' Editor of the London Observer is just a sampler of what astute readers of the newspaper have pointed out in the past year. To find out what really annoys readers, go to "Observer readers feel passionately that we should always get the story right".

• As far as I know, The Hindu is the only newspaper in India that has a Readers' Editor.

• Also read: "Apologising to readers".

A Facebook conversation that illustrates the perils of copying and pasting status messages, or sharing links, without studying closely those messages or links-2

Commitscion Ankana Sinha (Class of 2009), who works as a brand manager with ProNature Organic Foods in Bangalore, graciously consented to let me reproduce this discussion we had on Facebook earlier today:

Ankana Sinha via Rashi Churiwala

Worth a watch. Not sure how much of it is authentic though...

Anna Hazare - The Real Story

www.youtube.com

See the real story of Anna Hazare , checkout what his ex-colleagues have to say about him. You will be shocked to hear the real truth hidden from all of us.

19 hours ago ·  ·  · Share

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    Ramesh Prabhu If it's not authentic, why is it being passed on?
    

    15 hours ago ·  ·  1 person
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    Ankana Sinha Maybe because we just like controversies...
    

    2 hours ago · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu ‎Ankana: Please read this post and, afterwards, let me know what you think. Thank you. http://goo.gl/3IUkd
    

    
    

    THE READING ROOM: A Facebook conversation that illustrates the perils of copying and pasting status.

    engageentertainenlighten.blogspot.com
    

    This blog is for students of Commits, a media college in Bangalore, where I teac...See More

    
    

    50 minutes ago ·  · 
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    Ankana Sinha I have read this one. I will need a very long conversation with you on this. I shared this link because it was interesting, not because I believe it or subscribe to it.
    

    45 minutes ago · 
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    Ankana Sinha And I did try making it clear in the status message with the link.
    

    44 minutes ago · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu ‎1. If you don't believe in what you're "sharing", or if you don't subscribe to it, please make that clear in your status update. Your status update said, "Worth a watch".
    
    2. There will be lots of stuff on the net that could be considered "interesting", but before "sharing" any of it, please think twice. You may be giving unnecessary, and wrong, publicity to something that has no merit, or, worse, is blatantly untrue.
    

    41 minutes ago · 
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    Ankana Sinha It is worth a watch because those people are saying something interesting...I also said in my status that I doubt its credibility. Not once have I said it is true. Not once have i urged the viewers to "spread the message". I trust the viewers to use their discretion. Do you believe everything that is "thrown" at you?
    

    33 minutes ago · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu How do you know who these "people" are? What is their background? What agenda are they promoting? Who has made this video? With what purpose?
    
    My concern is that your friends, who have faith in your judgment, will believe what they see in this video. And that is not right if this video is a propaganda film.
    
    I have what I think is a healthy scepticism -- partly because of my nature, partly because of my training as a journalist -- so, no, I don't believe everything that is thrown at me. In fact, I don't even read such emails or watch such clips because I am deeply suspicious of their intent.
    

    28 minutes ago · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu And you did not say you doubt this video's credibility. You said, "Not sure how much of it is authentic though...". That gives the impression that you believe some of it is authentic. How would you know that?
    

    24 minutes ago · 
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    Ankana Sinha I don't think it means I believe it is part authentic. I am questioning its authenticity...it could mean that all of it is not authentic.
    

    22 minutes ago · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu My request: Please don't pass on anything that is not authentic. Please don't fall for these propaganda scams.
    

    21 minutes ago · 
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    Ankana Sinha ‎:) okay, granted.
    

    20 minutes ago · 

"Chaicoffeeidlivadatomatrsoupsipsaaay!"

Samosapedia claims to be the definitive guide to South Asian lingo, though at first glance it appears to be more like the sub-continental cousin of the US-based Urban Dictionary (you will see what I mean when you check out both websites).

Definitive guide or not, Samosapedia is definitely an idea whose time has come. Don't we all want to know how to "have a bucket bath" and aren't we on the lookout always for "cheap and best"?

As for "Chaicoffeeidlivadatomatrsoupsipsaaay!", here's the entry from Samosapedia: SipsayAugust 05, 2011, Word of the Day

Most people who've traveled on the Indian Railways would agree that the best part of the journey is the endless barrage of food that comes your way.

Depending on what region of India you're in, your choices might range from hot hot idli-vadas wrapped in banana leaves and newspapers, to steaming peppered tomato soup served in styrofoam cups, to chai/coffee, to SIPSAAAAY.

"What are sipsays?" you may ask. It took me a while to figure this one out. I would hear "Chaicoffeeidlivadatomatrsoupsipsaaay" bellowed as the vendors breezed pass our train cabin and always wonder what that last item was.

Why, of course! Chips! An adaptation of the English word for "chips" — or, as the Brits would say, "crisps" — "sipsay" are those delightful deep fried, salted, spiced slices of potato/jackfruit/banana that we all love to munch on!

Next time you're on a train and you hear "sipsay", stop the fella and grab a few. Then you'll really be able to sakkath majaa maadi on your journey!

Vendor: "Chaicoffeeidlivadatomatrsoupsipsaaay!!!!!!!!"
Child: Amma, I want banana chips!
Amma: OK mole. 

You know where to go now for your daily dose of chutney.

• Further reading: Samosapedia gets a mention in The Economist: The family tree of a mongrel language.

• Thank you, Satish Perumal (Class of 2011), for the tip-off.

A Facebook conversation that illustrates the perils of copying and pasting status messages, or sharing links, without studying closely those messages or links-1

Commitscion Noyon Jyoti Parasara (Class of 2007), who works with Mumbai Mirror, graciously consented to let me reproduce this discussion we had on Facebook earlier this week:


Noyon Jyoti Parasara

Interesting news feature. Indian corruption... congress and all involved

An Explosive story on Indian Corruption....must watch

This video is banned in India by Youtube...Please spare some time to watch this video and share as much you can...its an explosive report on Indian corruption which has never covered by Indian Media why? a big question mark..this is self explanatory why Congress not in favour of JanLokpal bill..

Length: ‎6:48

Friday at 12:20am ·  ·  · Share

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    Ramesh Prabhu Is this authentic? Or is this a propaganda clip? Does YouTube actually ban videos in India? Is that possible, Noyon?
    

    Friday at 10:29am · 
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    Noyon Jyoti Parasara Sir youtube can ban videos according to geographic locations. Certain videos are not available in India.
    Talking about facts.. Vadra is indeed a part of DLF as well as Unitech. There were reports in ET and some DNA.
    

    Friday at 10:35am · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu First question: Who decides on banning certain videos?
    

    Friday at 10:49am · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu Second question: Who produced this propaganda film? When there's no "author", what does it say about the credibility of the work?
    

    Friday at 10:50am · 
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    Noyon Jyoti Parasara It should be a propaganda feature considering it is quite lop-sided. But then sir, propaganda is not always lies...
    

    Friday at 10:53am · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu I agree. But please leave it to propagandists to publicise their propaganda. Journalists have no business asking people to watch this propaganda film.
    

    Friday at 10:55am · 
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    Noyon Jyoti Parasara But sir, any such feature is worth watching. Propaganda or not... would you not agree? Even if it just means to know what Propagandists are up to. And what information they can throw forth. To use it in the newspapers is where we could use restraint...
    

    Friday at 10:59am · 
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    Noyon Jyoti Parasara About youtube - the producer, the govt or the producer can decide
    

    Friday at 11:00am · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu Sure, experienced journalists, who have a healthy scepticism by training, should watch all kinds of clips (and read all kinds of literature) to be able to better understand the world around them. But they should not publicise propaganda films on sites like Facebook without at least a disclaimer: THIS IS A PROPAGANDA FILM. KEEP THAT IN MIND IF YOU'RE WATCHING IT.
    
    If there's no disclaimer, people watching this propaganda film will believe what they are seeing -- especially because a journalist is recommending it. Isn't that wrong?
    

    Friday at 11:03am · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu As for YouTube's banning policy -- can I read an authentic version somewhere? Can you send me the link? I want to see this for myself. I have a healthy scepticism, you see.
    

    Friday at 11:04am · 
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    Noyon Jyoti Parasara Agreed. Should have added that part
    

    Friday at 11:09am · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu And the YouTube banning policy link?
    

    Friday at 11:09am · 
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    Noyon Jyoti Parasara I will check and get a link. I know that they can restrict as I have come across such videos where Youtube mentions it cannot be seen in India. Infact films like Striker were released for free on Youtube. but indians could not watch it.. as the producers had an agreement with youtube. only viewers in US could see it.
    

    Friday at 11:12am · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu That can happen with "legal" films, like "Striker", but I doubt YouTube has a policy banning clips like the one you are trying to publicise. Please continue the search for the link.
    
    This is the trap one falls in when one copies and pastes status messages. If you were not sure about the YouTube policy, why did you not act when you saw that line at the top: "This video is banned in India by Youtube"?
    

    Friday at 11:16am · 
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    Noyon Jyoti Parasara I did not see that line. i just saw the video. I saw it only when you pointed.
    And sir, sometimes you can't fight evil by playing by the rules. :)
    

    Friday at 11:21am · 
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    Noyon Jyoti Parasara having said that i will try getting to the source of the video
    

    Friday at 11:21am · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu Don't you see what you are copying and pasting, Noyon? I worry about that. And are you telling me that you are trying to "fight evil" by publicising this propaganda film? I don't get it.
    

    Friday at 11:22am ·  ·  1 person
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    Noyon Jyoti Parasara The film does have facts. Facts i did not know... i checked that what the video mentioned about his business is not false. How people use those facts is again another matter. And i would like to leave it to them. No censorship.
    

    Friday at 11:27am · 
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    Noyon Jyoti Parasara But as i admitted, I should have mentioned it is a propaganda film
    

    Friday at 11:27am · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu Can you send me the links to the facts that you did not know since you checked them?
    

    Friday at 11:30am

Also read: A Facebook conversation that illustrates the perils of copying and pasting status messages, or sharing links, without studying closely those messages or links-2