Proofreading can make or break your annual report
Even if an organisation doesn’t love producing an annual report there is usually a legal or regulatory requirement to do so. And here at AM we understand that most organisations want to approach their annual report as a marketing opportunity – after all, together with the website, it’s probably the first port of call for prospective customers, suppliers, would-be employees and shareholders (not to mention competitors).
Set in stone
We’ve been asked to proofread some odd things over the years – there was a time when balloons came up quite a bit. You had to take inflation into account. And last week brought another first: the text for a stone plinth.
Sponsoring football at the grassroots
If Sepp Blatter ends up doing community service (the least he deserves), we’ve got a job for him at ‘our’ football team, Wymondley Park Under-11s (very soon to be Under-12s) – removing the dog poo from the pitch before kick-off.
Apostrophes, Wetherspoons and the past
Wetherspoons, the pub chain, have arrived in Hitchin, the market town in Hertfordshire where I live. And they’ve got themselves into a bit of a kerfuffle about apostrophes.
Our first venture into sponsorship
Greg Dyke, Chairman of the Football Association, tells us that grassroots football is in crisis. He’s probably right, although I did long ago conclude that pretty much everything I care about is in a perpetual state of crisis and that, unless you can afford to employ a Professional Worrier, you’re best just getting on with things, and que sera sera…
Are you a Tracey?
Bedsit Disco Queen by Tracey Thorn (Marine Girls, Everything but the Girl and in her own right, among other things) is a really good book. If you spent a disproportionate amount of the 1980s in record shops hunting down Belgian imports of Durutti Column 12-inchers – though you probably didn’t – you’re not going to emerge from this unscathed (and you’ll probably want to go back). Highly recommended.
A matters
My younger son wanted a Watford FC replica shirt for Christmas. As young boys tend to do, he’s meddled with supporting the big clubs (I’ve rather lost count) but has, it seems, eventually settled on a side that, if not quite local, is at least located in the same county as us.
Opening up, and keeping quiet
I did a day in house for one of our clients recently – they’re a contract publisher, producing a variety of communications on behalf of their clients, and it suits the way they do things for us to proofread their material on site. It works for us, too.
Natural accuracy
I hadn’t heard of the National Character Area (NCA) profiles until last year. There are 159 of them, and they describe in some detail areas of England that ‘share similar landscape characteristics, and follow natural lines in the landscape rather than administrative boundaries’.
Good grammar matters – but is this really so bad?
You may have heard about the recent Bad Grammar Awards, arranged by the Idler Academy. I wondered what they were going to have a go at – I hoped it wasn’t going to be another attack on market traders’ problems with apostrophes, which have always struck me as rather easy meat (and you try getting up at 4am to fetch the fruit and veg and see how much accurate punctuation matters.
