Brand protectors (gasp!) suggests stylistic changes to this communicator's document

I am working on a print document to be sent out to employees. Lots of text, lots of graphics; it’s going to be a nice piece. And that’s where our not-nice Brand department goose stepped in. Our Brand department takes Brand seriously; if they could use hot irons they really would. Their take: Our Brand is part of everything we do! Our Brand is our soul! My take: Our Brand is something that keeps our Brand department employed, so it’s no wonder they take it so seriously.

Actually, our top Brand guy is a great guy and very smart. He does an excellent job of shaping how people think about us, which is, after all, the essence of brand. But working with the rest of our Brand department is like working with religious zealots (very truly, deeply religious zealots). In their minds, our Brand is a complex, demanding deity that must be worshipped and revered in all sorts of arcane and intricate ways, and they are there to make sure we’re genuflecting properly. That process is called the Brand review.

I thought I passed our Brand review with flying colors. Our fonts were correct and correctly sized, and the graphics used only the Brand-approved color palette. Because this was a high-profile project (read: a project with a budget) I even went so far as to use the same agency that created our Brand for the art. Just to be sure.

After I got the initial nod from the Brand acolytes, I sent my document off for legal review. It was at that very moment that the Brand department coordinator emailed me to let me know that she had put the text through their Brand department copy writer, and he had a few stylistic changes.

You can imagine what my initial reaction was. (Conjure in your mind the image of a mushroom cloud.) Because as far as I am concerned, text is not a Brand element. The Brand department can tell me what size to say things in, or which color I have to say them in, but not what to say. Lucky for me (and for those who will read this piece when it’s finally published), our Brand police are not bright enough to make the transition to thought police. They probably think 1984 is some sort of yearbook.

Nonetheless, I decided to at least review the changes, despite the fact that it’s completely shoddy for the Brand department to ask for changes once they’ve given provisional approval for the document to be submitted for legal review. Still, if their proposed changes were in any way reasonable, I decided, I would implement them – even at the risk of peeving our august legal staff. For the good of the project, it was the right thing to do.

Not only was it the right thing to do, it was an easy thing to do. It’s always easy to take the moral (or in this case stylistic) high ground when you’re certain that no one else can claim it. Because no one in our Brand department has the merest grasp of style or the first inkling of how to use a style guide.

Here was what I got from the Brand department “writer” (with minimal editing from me, so you can enjoy the full irony of the punctuation errors within the request):

Percent: We spell this out, actually; can you revise?

Punctuation: Consistency above all (thanks!), but you should know we have one odd thing here at Company X: Everything gets XXX style, except for press releases, which get YYY style. So most docs get the series comma.

Where to start?

No. I cannot spell out percent signs within tables.

I did use the serial (not series) comma. If you had actually read the document, you would have noticed that.

Why would we use the XXX style guide at all, which spells out numbers 1 to 100? In fact, we don’t actually use the XXX style guide, or if we do, you’re not following it correctly, because all of our documents use numerals for above 10.

In one of your last pieces, you used the phrase “comprised of.” Is someone who makes that mistake really entitled to edit my document?

But of course it doesn’t do to say that.

I’m sure you have a vision of me going across the hall with the working end of a ball point pen, ready to puncture someone’s jugular. (Tempting, I admit, but ultimately career-limiting.) Instead, I wrote a cheerful reply email.

In my e-mail, I said that I would certainly spell out the percent signs within all the tables, but then the tables would likely need to be reformatted; that I had indeed used the serial comma; that my understanding of the XXX style guide that mandated the serial comma also mandated spelling out numbers 1 to 100, which I would absolutely do, but that would mean, in addition to having the tables redone, huge delays and likely rush charges to meet our deadline, which was totally okay with me if those changes were truly necessary and required by Brand, and that I would be happy to explain to the higher ups—to whom we all report—that Brand really felt that the document had to be changed and the cost overruns were really worth it to make sure that this document was completely Brand compliant, right down to the very last serial comma.

Are you at all surprised that our Brand department granted me a waiver for my transgressions?