I got an email newsletter the other day that exhorted….
So without further adieu, click here to buy my product
Umm, without further adieu? Really?
Sorry, but on that note I DO bid you adieu good sir!
See, the thing is that you obviously don’t know the phrase but you decided to use it anyway because you thought it sounded good. In others words you thought it was a really cool sparkly thing made of words. Well, as much as I loooove sparkly things, I’m hardly likely to spend money on a sparkly thing that might just be a bit of tin foil! I already have my hat.
And if you can’t be bothered using words properly, you can’t expect people to take you seriously. The internet is a huge and helpful place and a tiny bit of research can really help. Firstly, there’s Google. If you’re not sure of a phrase, a quick google of it will tell you what it is.
And if you spent the 15 seconds it takes to type “without further adieu” into a search engine, you would find that while there are in fact articles saying that without further adieu is a valid phrase, and others saying it is a joke at the expense of grammar nazis– you should be able to clearly see that when you’re trying to ask someone to do something without further delay, you mean “without further ado”
Of course, having a call to action that includes an error is even worse than having the mistake buried in your sales text. So never ever minimise the importance of taking the time to check your language, terminology and spelling, particularly in the key points of text. Even better, if you’re not sure about a word or phrase, maybe you just shouldn’t use it.
