News & Insights

Should we treat social media as a singular or a plural noun? The Latin scholars among us will point out that media is the plural of medium, and we should therefore use a plural verb with media. But English is not particularly accurate when it comes to Latin words. Data and bacteria, for example, are both plural in Latin, but are often treated as singular in English. So what should we do with social media?

In favour of treating social media as a plural, one could – and people do – argue that the term refers to several different communication channels, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Pinterest. And a lot of attention is given to how these various channels can be combined in various ways. In this context, it would make most sense to treat social media as a plural, as in these examples from The New York Times and The Financial Times:

Social media have had a truly revolutionary effect on…
Social media are not going to go away.
Most social media are perfectly suitable methods for communicating with investors.

But many more people now treat social media as a singular. After all, unlike most plurals, it doesn’t end in an –s! But more significantly, the various applications together form a new phenomenon or concept in communication. This leads many people to treat social media as a singular, as these examples (from equally reputable sources) show:

How social media is changing traditional reporting
Social media is what I’d call a romance contraceptive.
Social media isn’t just about collecting Facebook “likes” any more.
Social media is now the research tool of choice for headhunters.

So the answer to the question of whether you treat social media as a singular or plural depends on how you are using it. If you’re referring to a number of channels, then make it plural. But if you’re referring to the phenomenon that’s arisen because of them, singular is increasingly the way to go!

How did you do?

• The present is a good time to present the present.
  PRESent (“now”) and PRESent (“gift”) are both stressed on the first syllable, but preSENT (“to give”) is stressed on the second syllable. In all cases the s sounds like z – which is why we sometimes call a gift a prezzie!

• In HRM, it’s vital not to let personnel problems affect your personal life.
  personNEL (Dutch “personeel”) is stressed on the last syllable, but PERSonal (Dutch “persoonlijk”) is stressed on the first syllable.

• Two trainees would be too difficult to cope with, too.
  Two, to and too all sound the same, but many people get the spelling of too wrong – remember, too means “additionally” or “more than enough” – and has the extra o to prove it!

• Wearing protective lead clothing, the LED lighting team were led into the laboratory by the leading expert in the field.
  The name of the metal lead rhymes with bed and is easily confused with led, the past tense of lead “to lead”, which rhymes with need. LED (light-emitting diode) is spelt out in English pronunciation: ell-ee-DEE.

• I understand they’re now trying to get their business plan together there.
  They’re (“they are”), their and there all sound the same.

• The principal problem was that the principal players in the project insisted on sticking to principles.
  Principal can be an adjective (bijvoeglijk naamwoord) meaning “main” or a noun (zelfstandig naamwoord) meaning “head of a college or firm”, or “sum of money”. These should not be confused with the noun principle (“basic idea”), which sounds the same but is spelt differently.

• If the button on your jacket is loose, there is a good chance you will lose it.
  Loose (“not tight”) sounds like the Dutch name Loes, and rhymes with goose (with a sharp s). It is often confused with lose “to no longer have, to fail to win”, which rhymes with booze and cruise.

And if you’re wondering whether the past tense of “to spell” is spelt or spelled, it depends on whether you’re writing British or American English: the British tend to use spelt, the Americans spelled.

Don’t forget, if you have any questions about English usage that have been bothering you, let us know and we’ll see if we can answer them!

Working with new clients – immersing ourselves in their business and doing our best to prove our value to them – always gives an extra dimension of challenge and excitement to what we do. In the past months, we’ve had the pleasure of welcoming three who are all leading players in their respective industries, and who we hope will become a regular part of our own business.

The Netherlands Forensic Insititute (NFI) is one of the world’s leading forensic laboratories, providing products and services to a wide range of national and international clients. We helped NFI with its international English-language website and we continue to assist regularly with a variety of English communications.

Randstad Holding, the second-largest HR service provider in the world, initially approached us for assistance in editing E-link – their monthly digital internal newsletter. Since then, we’ve been asked to work on various internal and external communications on a regular basis.

We still have to prove ourselves to our latest big client – Gasunie. This European gas-infrastructure company provides the transport of natural gas and green gas in the Netherlands and Northern Germany. We will be involved in the production of the English-language version of their annual report.

It’s annual report time again, when companies release what is often considered their showcase document. Before beginning production, certain key decisions must be made: Print, digital or online? English or Dutch? And what about translations? Your choices can have a big impact on the impact your annual report ultimately has on your stakeholders. Here are some tips.

Structure

Sloppiness in an annual report can easily raise doubts about the care with which your company approaches its business in general. Whatever medium or language you choose, take care with the set-up. Make sure your information is clearly and logically structured and – especially – written in a consistent, uniform and easy-to-read style. If you don’t have solid in-house talent for writing and/or editing, it’s worth collaborating with outside experts.

Print, digital or online?

Attractive printed annual reports are expensive, and in today’s high-tech world, some people are predicting their demise – if only as an ecological issue. It’s also true that print can’t include all the possibilities provided by new technological tools. But print definitely still has very high impact, especially if you treat your annual report as your once-a-year chance to communicate properly with stakeholders. Then, it can be a fantastic piece of marketing communication. What seems to be a clear trend is well-produced ‘summary’ reports – with the more detailed information made available digitally. That is proving to be an extremely powerful combination!

Digital options:

• PDFs are inexpensive, but long annual reports can be hard to read onscreen, and it’s difficult to add extra features or appealing interactive tools. However, if you add bookmarks to the PDF, it makes it much easier to skip through to the desired section, and if you segment the report by chapters, readers can download and print exactly the one(s) they want.
• Dynamic, image-based reports are normally based on a hard-copy version, with each page being scanned and placed in a navigational framework. This option is also cost-efficient, and since it includes a search functionality, it is very easy to navigate. Content such as individual Excel sheets and PDFs in the report can also be downloaded by readers.
• HTML reporting – an actual website in itself – is extremely legible, and enables you to make use of all sorts of exciting multimedia and interactive tools. The downside is that developing, designing, programming and testing can be costly. However, once you have made the investment, you will have developed a solid template that you can use for years, adding new elements and tools as you go.

English or Dutch?

For international companies with English as their corporate language and a substantial portion of non-Dutch staff, most of the input will probably be in English. In that case, it simply makes sense to produce the document directly in that language rather than writing the report in Dutch first and having it translated. It is not only more efficient and economical, the results will be better. A well-written and well-edited English text remains the very best basis for translation of a document into a wide variety of languages. However, if the majority of employees and input are Dutch, it makes more sense to first write it in Dutch. If you need an English-language version, however, and have your report translated by a standard translation agency, make sure you have it checked by an English-language editor or writing expert to ensure optimum readability and effectiveness.

It’s always nice to feel like a winner! Last year, Baxter Communications received a 2012 APEX Award for Publication Excellence in the category Magazine & Journal Writing.

The APEX Awards is an annual competition for publishers, editors, writers and designers who create print, online, electronic and social media. Business, non-profit, agency and freelance communicators can enter to win awards in 11 major categories for their best work. Every year, the APEX judges select Grand Award winners and bestow Awards of Excellence to runners-up.

Since 2000, Baxter Communications has received numerous APEX Awards of Excellence, as well as one Grand Award for our Language Tips newsletter – the predecessor of More than Words.  This new award was for the Shea Matters magazine that we produced for our long-term customer IOI Loders Croklaan.

Explaining why Shea ‘matters’

IOI Loders Croklaan is a leading supplier of oils and fats for the food industry. The company provides a broad range of specialty oils, fats and nutritional ingredients for specific market segments worldwide. Although IOI Loders Croklaan’s core business is palm oil, they’re also involved in the Shea industry, and wanted a one-off publication for a major trade event that highlighted their sustainable way of doing business in this sector and the benefits of their end-to-end supply chain.

The result was Shea Matters, a 36-page full-colour magazine that covers every aspect of the Shea industry – from the tree to final products – and IOI Loder Croklaan’s involvement in it. This communication tool is proving to be extremely interesting and informative for IOI Loders Croklaan’s customers – and therefore valuable to the company.

When you are conveying different bits of information in a sentence, you generally have an innate feeling of what the best sequence is in which to present it. In Dutch, the tendency is to begin with the newest, most important or surprising information, followed by any background information that helps put it into context. But in English, it’s exactly the opposite! That explains why this sentence…

Her ability to give a demonstration while making a speech at the same time is what impressed me the most.

…will sound not quite right to a native speaker, even though it is ‘technically’ perfect. For them, the natural structure would be:

What impressed me the most was her ability to give a demonstration while making a speech at the same time.

This structure not only gives an English sentence the most natural style and ‘flow’, in longer sentences it also helps ensure the sentence is as clear and easy to understand as possible, as you’ll see in the following example:

The ability to interact with other business functions and systems such as payroll, accounts payable, general ledger and tax accounting is necessary for a travel and expense reporting system to be effective.

This rather complicated sentence is immediately simplified by putting the background/contextual info at the beginning, and the ‘key’ info at the end.

For a travel and expense reporting system to be effective, it must be able to interact with other business functions and systems such as payroll, accounts payable, general ledger and tax accounting.

There can be exceptions to this rule when you want to put special emphasis on a certain element of a sentence. But, in general, by ensuring the key information in a sentence is at the end, it will come across as much more natural to any native speakers in your audience.