These are the people we write for. The Lynne Trusses of the world. They're out there, buying this book in droves — the grammar nazis, the anal-retentive personalities , the nitpickers — whatever you might choose to call them, they exist with or without your approval or consent, and they'll cheerfully crucify you if they find your published work riddled with typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and other careless missteps that should be caught easily by an attentive proofreader.

Many people choose to treat advertising as a different animal when it comes to the copywriting side of things, and they're not necessarily wrong. In this industry, we don't have much time to get our point across. Communicating a powerful message in a few seconds often requires a bit of, shall we say, "massaging" of accepted standards. But mastering English to the extent that you can capably bend the rules is not on a par with writing or editing with lazy indifference.

We write to communicate, after all. So if we don't write clearly and with precision, if we don't make it easy for our audience to understand us, what message are we sending? That we expect them to do all the work? That we don't respect them enough to make our meaning clear?

Our aim is always to achieve perfection for our clients — but anyone who's ever worked on deadline knows that achieving perfection isn't always an attainable reality in this business. Having said that, there's no reason we shouldn't continue to hold the industry standard up high.

God forbid we might someday find Ms. Truss standing beneath one of our billboards with a giant apostrophe on a stick.