Email Subject

My wife, Mary Siever, received an email the other day with the subject “website”. Interestingly enough, nowhere in the email did it say anything about any website. Some advice: make sure the subject of your email has something to do with the content of your email. Particularly if the person you are writing received hundreds… Continue reading Email Subject

Proper Names

Someone at work tried telling me that ‘keys’ in ‘USB keys’ should be capitalised because it is a proper name (such as John Smith or Minneapolis). Just to be clear, ‘USB keys’ is not a proper noun. Neither is ‘Zip drives’ or ‘floppy drives’ or ‘hard drives’ or ‘monitors’ or ‘printers’ or any other computer… Continue reading Proper Names

Bold, italics, and overemphasis

A co-worker asked me to make some changes to a section of the website today. Part of the changes included some paragraphs with sentences that were in bold and italics. Why do people do this? Why is it when someone wants to emphasise something, they over-emphasise it?