Taking a closer look

Recently, a colleague of mine got an email. A marketing email, out of the blue from another company, hoping to ply him for trade. There’s lots like this flying about, my company sends them out en masse. What’s interesting about this one is that it has a bunch of errors in it.

So today I’ll be going through those errors, discussing why they’re wrong and how I’d fix them, to give you some insight on how a proofreader thinks.

As a reminder, this is a 100% real email someone sent. The only changes I’ve made are to remove names to help avoid embarrassment. If you want to play along at home, have a read through the email as it was sent, take notes, and I’ll tell you what I spotted after.

Hey [redacted],

I was looking at your profile on LinkedIn and started reading up on some of the things [redacted company name] is up to.

It got me thinking, and I wanted to introduce myself as we’ve worked over 23% of the organizations like [redacted company name] helping them with:

• Up-To-Date Company Contact Data
• Account-Based Marketing
• Contact Discovery (get new contacts based on ANY criteria)
• Contact Validation (if the contact is still at the company or not)
• Lead Generation
• Lead Enrichment
• Enhancing your Campaign Lists
• Email Marketing as a Service
• LinkedIn Outreach (accompanied with email sequences)
• Account Management

I’d love to line up a quick phone call to learn more about the work you’re doing and seeing if we might be able to help you like we have other companies in the Marketing And Advertising industry.

How does this week look for you? I’m generally available Tuesday and Friday mornings. Let me know what times work best for you and, we’ll get something on the calendar.

I look forward to meeting you!

Thanks,

[redacted name and job title]

Got your notes ready? Here’s the email again, but I’ve highlighted where I’m going to make changes — it’ll make the explanations easier if you’ve got a map.

Hey [redacted],

I was looking at your profile on LinkedIn and started reading up on some of the things¹ [redacted company name] is up to.

It² got me thinking, and I wanted to introduce myself³ as we’ve worked⁴ over 23% of the organizations like [redacted company name]⁵,⁶ helping them with:

• Up-To-Date Company Contact Data⁷
• Account-Based Marketing
• Contact Discovery (get new contacts based on ANY⁸ criteria)
• Contact Validation (if the contact is still at the company or not)
• Lead Generation
• Lead Enrichment
• Enhancing your Campaign Lists
• Email Marketing as a Service
• LinkedIn Outreach (accompanied with email sequences)
• Account Management

I’d love to line up a quick phone call to learn more about the work you’re doing and seeing⁹ if we might be able to¹⁰ help you like we have other companies in the Marketing And Advertising¹¹ industry.

How does this week look for you? I’m generally available Tuesday and Friday mornings. Let me know what times work best for you and, we’ll get something on¹² the calendar.

I look forward to meeting you!

Thanks,

[redacted name and job title]

Now that they’re all highlighted, they’re a bit easier to spot. But are you thinking of making the same changes as me? Let’s dive in and examine each one.

1. Here, there is a word missing. I would insert “that” after “things”. Why? Because in this sentence “that” is used to introduce a relative clause. Sometimes, you’re allowed to skip the “that” as the sentence still works without it, but I like to put it in to avoid writers missing it when it has to be there.

2. This one goes between paragraphs, so is tricky to spot. In the first paragraph is “some of the things” in reference to [redacted company name]’s activities. But the second paragraph starts with “It”. This creates what I call a singular/plural conflict. The author has established a multiple (the actions of [redacted company name]) and referred to them later as a singular, “It got me thinking”. There are a few ways to fix this, which I usually leave up to the writer. They could A) replace “It” with “They”, so referring to the multiple “things”. For B) they could change “It” to “That”, but this changes the line a little, as now what got the author thinking was the singular act of research, not the results of said research. And C) the largest change, is to shift “some of the things that” (remember the earlier addition of “that”) to simply “what”, so the line reads “reading up on what [redacted company name] is up to”. Though this implies that the company is only doing one thing, so you may want to go with one of the first two options.

3. Here is the phrase “I wanted to introduce myself”. I read this and think, ‘so you don’t want to now?’ Okay, I’m being a bit literal there. But also, whenever I imagine someone saying this out loud it’s always with a southern drawl and sometime in the 1850s. I can’t picture people using this phrase unironically anymore, so tend to avoid it. I’d add a note, recommending the writer to change it, and let them decide.

4. This is the big one that my colleague highlighted when they showed me the email. “as we’ve worked over 23%”. It’s missing “with” after “worked”. This is for another fancy grammar term, preposition. What’s really funny about this error though is that the sentence still works if you read “worked over” as a verb phrase, but unfortunately it has the opposite implication to what the author wanted.

5. This is a fun statistics error. Assuming we’ve put the “with” in from the fourth change, the second paragraph reads “worked with over 23% of organizations like [redacted company name]”. Where this falls down is that unless the reader knows exactly how many other companies there are like theirs, then the stat is meaningless. What this needs is either more context, along the lines of “60% of the Fortune 500” or conversion into an approximate number, like “over 200 companies like yours”. That is, unless you want to be like 60% of marketing emails.

6. This one was easier for me to spot than for you, since I redacted the company name. Let’s put in a fake name to help you out, and say the sentence is “organizations like Big Company helping them with”. Can you see it now? There should be a comma after the company name. The reason this got missed by the writer is the same as why you would have. The writer was looking at a mail merge field with similar brackets around it, something like “<company>”, and those brackets tricked them into thinking a comma wasn’t needed. I see it all the time with the start of letters, saying “Dear <name>” where it should be “Dear <name>,”.

7. Now, there isn’t actually anything grammatically wrong with “Up-to-date Company Contact Data”, but there are a couple of thoughts I had on it. First, this is a bit of an editor’s note, but it seems a little obvious or redundant to me. Shouldn’t everyone have contact information that’s up to date? Second, consistency-wise, this bullet stands out. It’s a noun phrase where the rest of the bullets are all activities. To fix both these issues, I would recommend changing “Up-to-date” to “Updating”.

8. Using capitals for emphasis is generally frowned upon, as no one wants to be shouted at over email. Let’s change that “ANY” to “any” and calm things down.

9. Here is an interesting and hard to spot conflict between verb types. At first glance you might think this is fine, but the part “the work you’re doing” is actually a noun phrase of what is being learned. Let’s switch it out with a single word and take another look. “…to learn more about history and seeing if…” Bit more obvious now, isn’t it? The activities being done by the author are “to learn” and “seeing”, but it doesn’t make sense to have different verb types in the same sentence, so we need to change “seeing” to “see”.

10. The phrase “if we might be able to” is a double uncertainty, and doesn’t look good to me. In a more of an editorial note, I would recommend changing to “if we can” or better, “how we can”.

11. This phrase “Marketing And Advertising” looks like a mail-merged title to me. In my day to day I would normally see “<industry>” or “<sector>”. It’s a shame that I don’t get to scrutinise the filled-in titles, because there are things I would highlight. The capital on “And” is too much and saying “marketing” and “advertising” together like that is redundant. Given the chance, I would send this back to the writer for reworking.

12. For the finale, a simple slip of the finger. The phrase “something on the calendar” should be “something in the calendar”.

For this email, I’ve highlighted a variety of changes and amendments that I would make. It just goes to show how complicated language can be and how important our choice of words is. Having someone look over your messages, even when they’re less than a page long, is always a good idea. No one can be right 100% of the time.

So, comes the question, have I been right here? Do you agree with all my changes? Did you spot something that I didn’t? Leave a comment with your thoughts.