An email that passed through my inbox yesterday (all names and incriminating nouns have been changed):
Afternoon All,
Customer Service – thank-you all for attending the Microsoft Training, everyone has now completed and I have thanked Chris for providing the tours on your behalf.
Hopefully you all learned a few things that will benefit the customer’s & your own knowledge.
Thanks,
Jane
The errors in this pile of donkey-do stack up more quickly than Dane Bowers’ plate at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. Let’s have a quick run-through, although obviously I don’t have time to pick through every stylistic and technical error.
Afternoon All,
What’s this? It’s pathetic. Notice how, by capitalising the ‘All’, the author attempts to half-heartedly formalise the ineloquent, faux-informal ‘Afternoon’. What sort of afternoon? The tone, usage and context of this are totally wrong.
Customer Service – thank-you all for attending the Microsoft Training
Why construct the sentence with the addressee at the beginning? And since when has ‘thank you’ (or the acceptable ‘thankyou’) been hyphenated? If the author had a decent grasp of written English, she could have rescued this sentence’s oddball structure – possibly even making its unusualness appealing. But she couldn’t.
everyone has now completed
What? Completed what? This sounds like some sort of pseudo science-fiction terminology; in fact, it wouldn’t seem out of place at a Scientology conference.
benefit the customer’s &
The coup de grâce. The incorrect apostrophe is good, but the incongruous ampersand is even better.

Comment by Paul — 28th June, 2007 @ 9:56 am
Comment by Gez — 28th June, 2007 @ 12:13 pm
Comment by Tom — 28th June, 2007 @ 12:27 pm
Comment by Paul — 28th June, 2007 @ 1:17 pm
Comment by Gez — 28th June, 2007 @ 5:39 pm
Comment by Dan — 29th June, 2007 @ 9:28 am
Comment by Gez — 29th June, 2007 @ 1:33 pm