Best Business Practices for Photographers [186]
Consider this circumstance. Suppose your assignment was to produce images for a brochure for a resort. In your correspondence, which accompanies your contract, you write:
Photographs shall be produced that illustrate guests in the following capacities: relaxing, dining, sleeping, exercising and recreating in resort facilities.
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NOTE
Avoid the use of "shall." Writers, especially lawyers, have an addiction to the word, and its use is unsafe. The California Supreme Court has said, "It is a general rule of construction that the word 'shall,' when found in a statute, is not to be construed as mandatory, unless the intent of the legislature that it shall be so construed is unequivocally evidenced." Use a word such as "will" or omit the word altogether instead.
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Is that four images as a deliverable or five? You might consider exercising and recreating to be a single thing, such as playing tennis or jogging. However, the resort may have just put in a $2 million state-of-the-art gym, and when you deliver images that do not include a guest using the gym, you've got a problem. I can see myself standing outside a gym during a scout visit, looking in and thinking, "Yes, they're exercising, but not really recreating, so let's skip that," and combining the two.
Instead, include the comma and change "shall" to "will"—or even better yet, use a bulleted list:
Photographs will be produced that illustrate guests in the following capacities: relaxing, dining, sleeping, exercising, and recreating in resort facilities.
When counseling attorneys on the importance of good grammar, Richard Wydick, author of "Should Lawyers Punctuate," from a 1990 issue of The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, illustrates the point thusly:
Maligned though it may be, punctuation can affect the meaning of an English sentence. Consider, for example, the [U.S. Constitution's] Fifth Amendment's due process clause. As punctuated by its drafters, it reads:
"[No person shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…."
Guided by the punctuation, our eyes quickly tell us that the phrase "due process of law" modifies the verb "be deprived." Thus, the Fifth Amendment requires due process if one is to be deprived of life, liberty, or property. But suppose the drafters had omitted the comma after "property." That would permit a lawyer to argue (in defiance of the provision's long history) that "without due process" modifies only "property." Thus, the Fifth Amendment would forbid deprivation of property without due process and would absolutely forbid both incarceration and the death penalty. Such is the power of a comma.
Your correspondence between you and a client or vendor should follow a standard path. For nearly a decade now, I have had an intern program in my office, and all of my interns have sent cover letters as a part of the application process. It is almost a guarantee that you will not be considered if your cover letter/e-mail is poorly written, contains spelling errors, or doesn't follow the common letter format.
E-mails contain dates, author name, and such by their very nature. However, in attached word processing files, these items are often missing. Make certain you include your name, company name, address, city/state/zip, and phone number, along with the date, in all such files. For faxes, and in some cases, within the e-mail itself, there is value in including the time that you wrote it.
When I am writing formal correspondence that