Month: November 2008

“Next days of observance of agents’ use of the tool”

Nouns

I saw this phrase yesterday in an email message.

Problem:
The noun “observance” is the wrong one for this phrase.

Explanation:
The phrase appeared in an email message about what an observer saw.

The phrase introduced the list of what he observed in subsequent days when he watched troubleshooting agents use a particular software application.

The noun “observance” has some eight definitions, the most popular of which include

  • an act of conforming to,
  • a celebration by appropriate ceremonies, and
  • a ceremony for a particular occasion.

Given that observation is one of the least popular definitions of the noun “observance”, it is best to avoid using “observance” when “observation” is the much clearer noun.

Solution:
“Next days of observation of agents’ use of the tool”

“Change of venue location”

Adjectives, Hyphens, Nouns, Redundancies

I saw this yesterday in a TV commercial.

Problem:
This phrase contains a redundancy.

Explanation:
“Change of venue location” appeared in Houston, Texas, in a television advertisement from Disney on Ice, an ice-skating theatrical performance company.

Disney put the phrase in the TV ad apparently because of Hurricane Ike’s impact on Houston.

If the phrase were approximately correct, then a hyphen should have been placed between “Change” and “of”, and another hyphen should have been placed between “of” and “venue”, so as to create a compound modifier of the noun “location”.

However, the noun “venue” and the noun “location” in modern parlance have come to mean the same thing, so this phrase contains a redundancy.

Beyond the redundancy, it is preferable to reserve the use of the noun “venue” to refer to the scene of a crime or to where a jury is convened.

This gives us the solution.

Solution:
“Change of location”

“Leader-led training”

Adjectives, Devolution toward Simpler, Redundancies

I have seen this in several announcements from one company.

Problem:
The adjective “leader-led” is self-redundant and does not tell you who is doing the leading.

Explanation:
Courses offered by companies before the advent of computers were called “corporate training” or simply “training”.

The advent of computers and authoring tools made “computer-based training” possible.

The advent of the Web and more authoring tools made “Web-based training” possible.

These two phrases forced writers and speakers to look for a special phrase to distinguish non-computer-based training from computer-based training and Web-based training, but “non-computer-based training” was too long and somewhat negative.

This resulted in the creation of the phrase “instructor-led training”.

Unfortunately, this phrase has deteriorated in some quarters into “leader-led training”, which says nothing about who is doing the leading of the training.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “instructor-led training” — 519,000 matches
  • “instructor-led courses” — 85,800 matches
  • “leader-led training” — 597 matches
  • “leader-led courses” — 410 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the meaningful “instructor-led” versus the meaningless “leader-led” by a ratio of 601-to-1, which is excellent.

However, this does not mean that “leader-led” as an adjective will not grow in popularity. I believe that the replacement of “instructor-led” with “leader-led” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

It is simpler to write or say the two-syllable noun “leader” than it is to write or say the three-syllable noun “instructor”, and “leader” — not “instructor” — is alliterative with “led”.

Solution:
“Instructor-led training”