19 August 2009

The Importance of Punctuation

On the Woodside Employment Consultants website, they advertise themselves as follows:

Certified Small Woman Owned Business Enterprise


This is a declarative sentence: a small woman, who has some kind of certification, owned a business enterprise.

Good for her!

While I have nothing against small women in business, I do not think that this was their intended meaning. If the people at Woodside knew some basic rules of punctuation, they could have avoided embarrassment by writing:

Certified, Small, Woman-Owned Business Enterprise