Bad Writing at the Days Inn
April 16th, 2008, 10 Comments »
I spent much of yesterday afternoon and evening working in a hotel room. I got into Vancouver yesterday in good time, and had a ton to do. I ensconced myself at the Days Inn (oddly, they don’t use an apostrophe) and went to town.
I find that I’m very productive in hotel rooms. There are no distractions, and the essentials of life–bed, bathroom, food–are close at hand. Douglas Adams, a noted procrastinator, wrote most of So Long and Thanks For All the Fish in a hotel room, under the constant supervision of his editor.
Maybe it was because we ran a corporate writing workshop last week, but I’ve recently been paying more attention to how ordinary things are described and labelled. I noticed a trend in my room. See if you can spot it:
The writing isn’t awful–you can still get the message–but it ain’t good. They have “a variety of sundry items available”? It must be a real mess behind that front desk. And the other pieces are terribly overwritten.
I was otherwise quite happy with my room at the Day’s Inn. It was nothing to write home about, but it was comfortable and they had free wifi. In fact, they may be near that tipping point of hotels where the hotel gets too nice to offer free wifi. Maybe there’s a rule of thumb here: less than three stars, free wifi. More than three stars, they screw you on wifi access.