As PR consultants, we’re a creative bunch of people who enjoy developing ideas that will grab attention. We’re also self-confessed word geeks who have lots of fun playing around with syntax and grammar. My name’s Lucy and I’m a word geek. There – I’ve said it.

We love coining a new phrase and generating excitement around a totally new and previously unheard-of concept. With that in mind, you can probably imagine our excitement when we read in today’s papers that over a thousand ‘new’ terms have recently been added to Oxford Dictionaries Online. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the PR industry would like to claim some of the credit for this, as many of these new words are likely to have been created as part of a PR campaign.

The new additions include ‘tanorexia’, meaning an addiction to fake-tanning, and ‘scareware’, the name given to programmes that’ll harm your computer. One of our favourite new words is ‘bloggable’ – the term for a subject that’s worth writing a blog about.

I can’t wait to log on to my laptop and look again at the latest version of the dictionary. I’m up to ‘S’ already and my favourite new word so far has to be ‘starchitect’, meaning a famous and well-known architect.

What’s your favourite new word?

This week, alarmed bosses at the Leeds Building Society drafted in the services of a former English teacher to give their staff grammar lessons. Senior staff at the building society were so appalled at their employees’ low standard of written English that they decided to take staff back to school.

An admirable move and – coincidentally – one that mirrors a recent appointment at Peppermint. Our team now includes David Williams, former English teacher and language expert extraordinaire, who’s been elucidating (yes, elucidating) the finer points of grammar in a series of workshops at the office. David has also taken up the mantle of quality control manager to ensure that every piece of copy leaving the office is perfect. I don’t believe that our clients – or the journalists we work with – deserve anything less.

We’ve even introduced a marking system – the top grade’s an A* and all of our team members are eager to be the star pupil.

Why all this fuss? Words are the currency of PR consultants and our clients trust us to handle their communications with skill, accuracy and attention to detail. A sloppily written piece of copy tarnishes their reputation along with our own.

Many journalists will agree that a depressingly large number of press releases sent to them are littered with basic grammatical and punctuation errors. This does our industry no justice at all. If we can’t get the little things right, how can we be trusted with the big things?

It’s time for the PR industry to insist on exacting standards of grammar and punctuation. We are, after all, the experts in communications. There are no excuses for not doing that job correctly.

I salute Stefan Gatward of Tunbridge Wells who, having been tortured daily by a misspelt road sign, has taken matters into his own hands.  The former solider has resorted to vigilante action by painting on the apostrophe in St John’s Close.

It’s gratifying to see that the poor apostrophe is still respected by die-hard sticklers for grammatical accuracy.  From my vantage point as head of a PR agency, however, the scale of ignorance is grindingly depressing.

It seems that an alarming – and growing – number of would-be and actual PR practitioners have very little grasp of how to punctuate a sentence.

At Peppermint PR, we ask all potential employees to complete a straightforward copy test.  Some of the results have been, frankly, eye-watering: all the more so, given the seniority of many of the candidates.

As PR consultants, our currency is the written word.  We have an obligation to get it right.  Full stop.

Actually, potty training is proving to be even more onerous than I remember from the last couple of times – so I really do pity the increasing number of reception teachers who are being faced with four-year-olds who are still in nappies when they start school because their witless parents have not bothered to train them.  I can’t imagine what sort of disruption this is causing to classes that are already hampered by grunting children who have not yet mastered language from their electronic babysitters.

I see something of a parallel emerging in the workplace.  I can’t be the only fastidious employer out there who is regularly shocked by plummeting standards of literacy amongst twenty-somethings.  What this means is that otherwise competent, bright and hardworking individuals are having to be taught basic grammar and punctuation on company time when they should be getting on with their job. Potty training for grown-ups.

I’m increasingly seeing candidates who have breezed through an English language A-level course (often achieving an A or A*) followed by a degree in English, journalism or PR (inevitably a 2:1 since most universities seem to have all but jettisoned the 2.2). All well and good, you might think on paper. Yet, as soon as I give them a copy test, it becomes glaringly apparent that not a single teacher or lecturer in all those years has picked them up on serious, serial grammatical errors. I’m talking basic English here – like how to spell ‘its place’ or ‘the country’s language’.  How on earth is this possible in a nation as advanced as the UK???

At Peppermint – where every bit of copy is double-checked for accuracy before it leaves the office – we’ve gone as far as introducing a self-regulating system where employees ‘fine’ themselves 20p for every misplaced apostrophe, with the money going to a local hospice.

This may seem draconian…but I’ve seen the alternative.  Candidates from other agencies pitch up for interview with samples of their ‘best’ work.  More often than not, these are press releases riddled with toe-curling mistakes that I then proceed to circulate round my own team with the words ‘DON’T EVER DO THIS’ scrawled across the top. And to think that client companies are being charged for the privilege of having someone write pidgin English on their behalf.

But it’s not just in the world of PR that standards are sliding. I’m clocking misspellings and misuse of apostrophes in regional papers’ editorials with depressing regularity (I saw one last week that had failed to spell Friday correctly on its masthead) – and, very disappointingly, the odd one creeping into our most respected broadsheets.

I’d always scrutinised A-Level results as a reliable barometer of a potential employee’s abilities – but these days an A grade English language A-Level is no guarantee of even a nodding acquaintance with basic grammar. And that’s a real bummer for the poor candidate who’s worked really hard, is proud of their achievements, but has been let down dismally by their tutors.  I can only conclude that a large chunk of the UK education system has simply thrown in the towel when it comes to correct writing, so it’s left to the eventual employer to clean up the mess.

The British are firmly on course for becoming a universal laughing stock for not being able to communicate correctly or cogently in their own language.  My 20-year-old Slovakian au pair writes word-perfect English (with impeccable use of apostrophes) and reads the Guardian and Economist religiously.  Contrast that with many of our home-grown graduates who don’t read past Heat.  Meanwhile, it’s been uncovered that certain British universities are ‘allowing themselves’ the discretion to award more first class degrees to up their rankings. When I got one of those back in the early 90s, I bloody well earned it.

So what do we do? For a start, I’m all for reintroducing good old-fashioned dictation throughout primary and secondary education. I’d also welcome a frank debate with teachers and university lecturers of subjects such as English so they can hear first-hand what problems their legacy is causing for industry.  Finally, I’d champion the resurrection of the F-word that dare not speak its name: FAIL.