Why do estate agents feel it necessary to write such awful descriptions of houses they have for sale? They appear all to agree on the following “style guide”:
- Never use one simple word if you can find a circumlocution
- Never use a common word when you can find a “fancy” one
- Ignore punctuation
- Do not check if what you have written actually makes sense
- Do not check the meanings of words
 in a sought-after location? |
In a recent edition of the local weekly newspaper The Cornishman we had an advertisement for the sale of the former home of the late Sir Terry Frost, quite a famous artist. One of the attractions of this, according to the agent, was the property’s “notorious former resident”, or some such wording. I wonder what the Frost family thought of that. And what is wrong with the two little words “well” and “known”? Other pieces of nonsense I have spotted recently include a sitting room which welcomes you and an aforementioned garden which had not been mentioned at all.
I wonder if there is a central estate-agent-de-education agency which trains people to write adverts which “benefit from a wealth of” utter twaddle.
