Persuasive Business Proposals: Writing to Win More Customers, Clients, and Contracts

Trap 3: Creating Noun Clusters

Living languages change constantly. That’s how you know they’re alive. Certainly the English language, and particularly that version of it spoken in the United States, has changed in many ways just within our lifetimes. For example, people no longer say “I shall” and “you or he will” for future tense. Now, all of us “will,” and we leave “shall” to imply obligation. That’s cleaner than the old rule, which never made much sense anyway.

Other changes have affected our vocabulary. I recently read an amusing essay by the British novelist and critic David Lodge, “Where It’s At: The Poetry of Psychobabble,” which was first published in 1981. In it he analyzed and explained a slew of “deviant constructions” that had apparently ...