Are we really going forward? Or is business speak actually holding us all back? We think the latter, so you can imagine how disturbed we were when David Beckham came out with "Going forward, who knows?" recently. It's not his fault - clearly the boot Sir Alex ricocheted off his noggin had been spiked with DNA from Sir Alan Sugar's apprentice. But does this mean he's really a key team player now? Will the LA Galaxy and England teams achieve a major paradigm shift? Will Becks really be thinking outside the box?

It's not all bad. Being freelance copywriters, we get to meet a wide variety of different people, and we're pleased to say many of them are rejecting corporate speak in favour of sounding like people. They don't adopt a strange way of speaking to their market or audience just for the sake of it, but they find out what they're good at and use their language as a device to carry that idea. Radical notion eh? Run it up the flagpole and see if it gets a salute.

We’re firm believers in speaking to specialists. If you want a leak fixing, you hire a plumber. If you want words writing, you hire a copywriter (and maybe another plumber for that plug). And if you want a viral, or you don’t have the first clue about the black art of virals, hire someone like RubberRepublic. They’ve just made this very nice site for JVC and Euro 2008. It’s caused lots of folks to tell other folks about it - much as we just did – so it’s been very effective. We can’t be held responsible for your dip in productivity when you become addicted to it, mind. You’ve been warned.

Want to make people listen? Then don't pretend to be something you're not. In fact, forcing an inappropriate tone of voice just makes you look false. So make sure the voice you use is based on a truth about what you do, or who you are.

Take the folks at Bulldog. We came across their grooming goodies while shopping for The Word Department bathroom cupboard. And we liked their packaging because it didn't use posturing footballers or back-slapping, pearly-white-toothed father/son grins. Boldly taking on a whole new area of male grooming with products that don't contain nasty things like parabens or articial this, that and the other, they're standing out with a voice that speaks to blokes the same way blokes speak themselves. And that's it.

Simple idea. But they're always the ones that work. Good dog.

"Please make sure you take your belongings with you if alighting at Leeds."

That's what one of our writers heard on the west coast line this week. But why not just say "when leaving the train at Leeds"? When's the last time you heard someone use the word 'alighting'? Well, perhaps George Stephenson uttered it in 1830, but even that was probably a joke at the expense of poor William Huskisson.

Surprisingly, the train company in question spend a lot of money on branding. Yet when it comes to communicating directly with their customers, it seems they prefer to sound like a character from a Jane Austen novel. Odd.

The lesson for all of us? Every little bit of communication counts, so the details are important - don't overlook them.

We thought we should say that Google fixed the little hiccup involving our site. And because Google are a bit mysterious (not unlike us), you never know who it is that fixed the problem. Someone just sees the message you place on a noticeboard, then fixes it.

Anyway, when someone searches for 'The Word Department', they'll now be able to find us. So if you read this Google, then thanks. We appreciate it.

We broke Google. We didn't mean to. And it wasn't out fault. Everyone wants their website to come out at the top of the list when people search on their name. So when people put 'the word department' into Google, we expect to pop up at the top.

Think again. Due to an as-yet-unknown problem over at Google, searching for us in U.S Google actually reveals results for 'the world department'. Yep, the search engine giant is having trouble differentiating between 'world' and 'word'. If you try the same search on Google.co.uk, we come out top.

Bizarre. But we're assured they're fixing it. They'd better be, or we'll send a couple of agents over there. And they don't want that.