For the past four or five years, I've been involved in some corporate copywriting for two very large organisations. This work came to an end on Wednesday this week. One of the entities had taken its outsourced writing in-house a few months ago, the other decided it wanted a different approach to its copywriting needs as March came to a close. It therefore bid adieu to the agency that had, in turn, contracted me.
Finding out that this throughput of work was coming to an end might have been stressful. After all, it helped pay the bills. But life is curious. No sooner had I been told the gig would be ending, than a ton of other work landed - interesting, rewarding, exciting work with pleasant people.
And today, I remembered an admonition. I'd written a piece about how the second of the two businesses had opened a new office somewhere. As is the way of this kind of writing, everything has to be on the up; negatives are disallowed. And so, having been informed about how the new office was going great guns (so soon after its opening), I wrote something like:
Already our new office in Lima is blossoming.
The admonition asked me to rewrite that phrase. The reason?
"Law firm offices do not blossom".
