Quality underpins everything you do. Doesn’t it? When you see a swan swimming, you see a rather handsome white bird gliding on the surface. You don’t need to see the effort it’s making under the water to move itself along.

Quality is an axiom in good business practice.

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Plethora and Myriad: These two sound like a couple of heroines from a Greek tragedy. I’m sure they have their place in the richness of poetry and literature. But in business they get in the way of clear writing and slow down your readers’ journey through your website. People who don’t have the Latin, or the Greek, or whose first language is not English, will stumble on these words and wonder what the hell you are talking about.

Trust me: if you have lots of whatever it is you offer – ideas, shower heads, shoes, activities – all you need to say is ‘many’, and show a sample of your best ones.

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‘Can we get you on Mastermind, Sybil? Next contestant, Sybil Fawlty from Torquay, specialist subject: The bleedin’ obvious.’*

It goes like this. You get a nice big chunk of money to do something useful from which many people will benefit.
But hey, first, let’s generate huge amounts of paperwork on surveys and reports and strategy documents and road maps so that we can tell all those people…

…the bleedin’ obvious.

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When I was little, my mum took me to Lyon’s Corner House and I remember asking her why they had a brassiere and girdle on the first floor – I thought maybe they had branched out into lingerie. Mind you, you’re looking at someone who was well into her adult life before she found out that a Bourbon and Coke was not a Coca-Cola with a side order of chocolate biscuit.

I was reminded of my question yesterday, as I worked my way through a guide to office life in Australia:

‘It is perfectly OK to bring your own packed lunch into the office. Having said that most offices are close to a myriad of shopping malls, which have huge brassieres inside so there is a choice.’

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You can get anything that you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.

I wonder, would Arlo Guthrie have sounded so persuasive if he had sung:

An unlimited range of facilities is available at Alice’s Restaurant.

I’m editing a travel guide. At the end of nearly every page the author has introduced links with this phrase:

Further information is available by going to this website.

These 18 syllables tell me nothing about the link and the ‘further information’ I will find there. Available is a ‘can-do’ adjective. Others include ‘obtainable’ and ‘measurable’. You make these adjectives by sticking ‘-able’ on the verbs avail, obtain or measure. If something is available, your reader can have it, or do it. They want to know, quickly:

• What can they have or do?
• How can they get it?

They want your links to be packed with detail so they know what they will find when they click through. I want you to put your readers in the driving seat and give them back the word ‘can’. So instead of ‘further information is available’ you tell them

You can find out more…

…and, because you have saved 13 syllables, you can give them more details of the product or service you offer, for example.

You can find out more about bungy jumping in Queenstown.

Even more clumsy than ‘available’ is the noun ‘availability’ as in

Check the availability of broadband in your area.

which I’ve changed to:

Find out if you can get broadband.