King Marketing

AJ Kandy
Creative Director

AJ brings over 17 years' experience to KMA+C.

Previously in charge of Branding, Interactive and Creative at telecom software maker Interstar Technologies, AJ also served as Art Director at magazine publisher EMG Media. He's also worked on projects for Power Corporation, Air Canada, Merck Frosst and BCE Teleglobe.

AJ is a graduate of Concordia University's Communication Studies program.

Other KMA+C Blogs

Ken King, President

Previously: Make good writing a cornerstone of your brand
Next: The dreaded passive voice

Subjects and objects

Part two of our tips for better business writing.

It’s inevitable that your copy will go through multiple hands before finding its way to the audience. The editing-by-committee process often compounds subject-object and verb tense errors. Here’s how to spot and avoid these mistakes before it’s too late.

Subject and object pronoun matching. It’s a basic one, but multiple edits to a document often leave beginnings and endings of sentences mistmatched; singular subjects with plural objects, for instance:

  • Each employee is asked to park his or her car in the designated lot

is correct, whereas

  • Each employee is asked to park their car in the designated lot

is not, because employee isn’t plural, and you can’t really say “employees” there either, because it implies that all the employees share a single car, like circus acrobats. I suppose that might apply if you work at Cirque du Soleil, but otherwise, no.

Verb tense matching. In a single clause or non-compound sentence, all the verbs’ tenses should match. For instance:

  • The team went to Taiwan where they visited the new semiconductor facility

is correct, whereas

  • The team goes to Taiwan where they visited the new facility

is not, obviously. It is possible to have different tenses in a compound sentence, one for each clause, such as:

  • The team is currently in Taiwan where they are visiting the new semiconductor facility, and then they will travel to Hong Kong for a series of business meetings.

In this example, the first clause is in the present tense, and the second is in the future tense, joined by “and then.” What creeps in more insidiously are mismatches such as:

  • The team is currently in Taiwan where they visited the new semiconductor facility, and go to Hong Kong for business meetings.

where we have jumbled tenses. You’ll often see this when formerly separate sentences are joined together, an edit isn’t completed properly, or a clause is added without checking for verb tense agreement.

Next: the dreaded passive voice.

May 23, 2006 10:21 AM

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