Management Bits and Tips

People feel uncomfortable if not irritated or alienated when they see their misspelled names (bit). Don’t rely on your native language patterns or automatic spell checking. Verify names manually before hitting “Send” button (tip).

For example, in English it is rare when a name starts with both consonants and it is not easy to pronounce Dmitry or Dmitri (both are English and French spelling of the same Russian name) than Dimitry. Therefore people tend to write the latter. Once I got an email starting with “Dear Dirty”. At that time that was the default suggestion from Microsoft Word spell checker.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Flawless writing skills are very important to avoid negative impression (bit). Use Google to check your writing (tip).

It is especially important for non-native English speakers like me. You can search simple sub-sentences and their alterations to compare search results.

For example, today I had a discussion about this sub-sentence:

“It’s main advantage is “

It gives 539 search results. However the sentence without apostrophe

“Its main advantage is “

gives 8,870 search results. Let’s check combinations with two “it”.

• “It’s main advantage is it’s ” - 192 results
• “Its main advantage is it’s ” - 0 results
• “It’s main advantage is its “ - 299 results
• “Its main advantage is its ” - 836 results

So you get the idea of what is more correct or more widely used from descriptive grammar point of view.

Copied with minor corrections from my Crash Dump Analysis blog

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -