Weldon

I sympathise with you in your predicament. I too was involved in a job in which, for my sins, I was partly responsible for the quality of the letters (and any other 'external' written material we produced). Only partly, though, and herein lies the rub. The managers in the field were determined to go about winning business, except that the quality of their writing (and let us not even begin to consider the 'quality' of writing of the staff they had reporting to them) was not, how shall I say it, up to scratch. The number of "Thank you for meeting myself"s that I thanklessly got rid of ("But 'me' doesn't sound right!" being the general complaint), the number of "cultural synergy"s I discarded, the number of "pro-active"s I binned were all in vain. Eventually the sales team got together and decided that 'we' would write seven standard letters and everybody else would use these templates, with a mandate that extended only to changing the titles and names involved.

Now if only enough of our staff had had a slightly more rigorous technical background in the use of English...

But then it is likely that every generation has said this about those younger than them. Ah well... a depressing note on which to mark my 300th post.