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Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Please, Stop Verbing Your Nouns | Andrew Nattan, Copywriting Blog

In short, here's the main point of Nattan's blog posting:
Verbing, or verbification, is the practice of taking a harmless, charming little noun and forcibly cramming it into parts of a sentence where a verb would normally sit.
For example, “Inbox”, a noun referring to the part of your email account where incoming mail is shown, has been verbed.
Where we’d once say something quick and cheerful like “drop me an email”, certain people now use the brutally curt “inbox me”.
And it looks horrible. 
I agree!

He also comments on some other verbs used horribly as nouns that readers sent to him: weird, architect, minute, medal, trend, action and dialogue.

BTW, in all the style manuals I respect and consult in the United States, commas and periods always go inside quotation marks. I would edit Nattan's use of those marks in his blog.

1 comment:

Please comment on my blog post--or ask me a question about writing!.

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