"Principals"

This week's error comes from a brochure I received promoting a seminar to help me become a better communicator. The brochure and seminar come from a well-regarded, usually highly-credible organization.

"Principals" are people who are in charge of an organization or responsible for something. Your elementary school, for example, had a principal -- and your consulting firm may, too. There are numerous other meanings of "principal" (check your dictionary) but none of them is appropriate in this context.

"Principles" are basic truths or laws that help us organize or make sense of things. For example, in Public Relations we study the principles of persuasion -- a set of fundamental truths that help us understand how people tend to respond to things.

This seminar, I'm fairly certain, discusses the fundamentals of crowdsourcing -- not the people in charge.