The Words Most Commonly Confused and How UNICEF Uses them in Its Publications : Fouad Kronfol

You can find many articles which try to help writers and editors unscramble confused words. Examples are many, including: 
affect vs. effect
Their vs. There vs They're
Your vs. You're
It's vs Its
And many more...

But UNICEF's writers have special challenges with confused and confusing words, including: 

 
"Strategic"
As in Strategic Plan and others. It used to be called the Medium Term Plan which foresaw the main directions that UNICEF programmes were going. Now almost every official document has the word strategic in it, undoubtedly to give it more weight and seriousness.

"Hyphenated Words"
Seems that the English language is not sufficiently rich so that there is a heavy load of words in all documents that are hyphenated to impress on the reader the importance of the message, or is it because the readers wouldn't otherwise grasp the meaning of a single word ? eg. impact-oriented; results-based; evidence-based; climate-resilient, etc. you get the drift.

"Catalyse impact"
Beats me, but how does one catalyse impact?

"Other duty bearers"
I can understand "governments", but who are these duty bearers? Sounds like some tax men !

"Accelerators"
Always thought these were the pedals in cars which one pressed for speeding. But no, UNICEF says they are adolescent girls,
community & frontline systems; innovation & digital technology...HMMMMM.

I could go on, but it is late and I am drifting into sleep.

Federico Garofalo.
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