Career and Kids

Writing for success at work - extradite

by mike on October 20th, 2006

Using big words at work can impress some and tune out others.  They have their time and place.

I am often told that I write emails to my wife, and often blog posts, like a drunken donkey.  I rarely do more than a cursory spell/grammar check which might have something to do with why my wife sometimes grinds her teeth in her sleep.

One of the things I do a relatively good job of at work is not practicing my word of the day vocabulary in work emails.

Today, I received an email from a coworker who wanted some information about the location of a file on a client’s server.  He was trying to fix a process that caused the file to get handled improperly.  He also wanted to grab the original file and hand edit it so that he could get the client a valid file as quickly as possible.

In the email, he told me that he was trying “to extradite this.”

I wanted to tell him that he should contact the authorities in the proper country and also ask him what he thought the file was guilty of.

He probably was trying to expedite getting the issue resolve but instead he ended up sounding like a drunken donkey.  Most people will overlook a misused “there” or misspelled “the.”  Big words attract attention and analysis.  Our brains love to latch on to the unique.  When typing work emails, leave your big words at home and if you really must use them, at least try and make sure you use them in the right context.  You can use Google to help.  Just type “definition:” and then whatever word you want to look up.  This will give you links to find the correct definition and also notify you if you misspelled it.
Now, feel free to find all of my typing errors in this post.  Just make sure you write about them on your own blog.  Tell your readers you were reading an article that looked like it was typed by a drunken donkey.  They’ll know who you are talking about.

Share This

Related Stories

In case you missed it the first time
Are we ready to give up learning handwriting
New Business Etiquette for the New Millenium?
Spending time in your child’s classroom
Telecommuting not working out after all?

POSTED IN: Career