Write It Well

Very few business writers know the basic guidelines for when you do and don’t type a hyphen. Your writing can create an especially careful and polished impression when you grasp these three guidelines:

1. Don’t add a hyphen after most prefixes.
2. Don’t type a hyphen after a word that ends with -ly.
3. Do add a hyphen when most two-word descriptions come before a noun.

First, leave out a hyphen after a prefix in most words – e.g., preapproved or unplanned. But feel free to add a hyphen when the same letter is repeated – e.g., pre-existing or un-newsworthy.

Webster’s dictionary only includes hyphens after prefixes when a word would be unclear without it. (E.g., co-op is a two-syllable noun for a kind of apartment, while coop is a one-syllable noun for a chicken cage).

Second, never add hyphens after words that end with -ly (e.g., it’s incorrect to type the hyphen in “clearly-written report”).

And for other words, do add a hyphen to a two-word description that comes before a noun (“It’s a well-written report“) but leave out the hyphen when the same description follows the noun (“The report is well written”).

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two chapters on punctuation to help you boost the impact of all your business documents.

We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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Three of the verb forms in this sentence are a great illustration of how the passive voice can be the best fit for a sentence:

Shucked oysters packed in their liquor will keep up to a week if kept quite cold.

Here’s the same sentence recast in the active voice:

If you shuck oysters and pack them in their liquor, they will keep up to a week if you keep them quite cold.

The passive voice usually streamlines a sentence by making it clear who does what. But in this case, the active voice makes the sentence longer with the unnecessary pronouns you, they, and them.

When you’re deciding whether to use the active or passive voice, just ask yourself if it matters who takes an action, and decide which option delivers your meaning more easily.

If you ran an oyster bar and retail outlet, you’d probably prefer the first sentence.

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on verbs to help you boost the impact of all your business documents.

We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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When you use punctuation skillfully, you can influence your readers to either skim over an idea or to pay more attention to it. Take a look at this sentence:

Just one team among baseball’s lowest payrolls—the Diamondbacks—is likely to make the playoffs.

Now compare it with this revised sentence:

Just one team among baseball’s lowest payrolls (the Diamondbacks) is likely to make the playoffs.

Do you hear an enthusiasm difference? The dashes emphasize the team’s name while the parentheses deemphasize it.

A proud fan of the team should choose dashes to emphasize the Diamondbacks’ accomplishment. And a rival team’s fan could use parentheses to make the Diamondbacks sound trivial.

Think of these contrasting punctuation marks as a kind of volume control. It’s as if you lower your voice when you use parentheses and raise it when you use dashes.

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two chapters that help you master the nuances of punctuation for maximum clarity and impact in all your business documents.

We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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Biz India editor Ramu Nakliba writes that “we cannot overestimate the value” business writers can receive from Write It Well’s book Professional Writing Skills.

Nakliba praises the book’s clear organization and its targeted exercises that help businesspeople practice the writing they actually do at their jobs from day to day.

Professional Writing Skills is a terrific tool to help individuals or groups become better writers. Contact us for more information about any of the following Write It Well services:

• on-site trainings (using Professional Writing Skills or another workbook from the Write It Well series)
• webinars
• bulk book orders

How often do you type a sentence, find it unclear, and then get a headache untangling your ideas? One effective detangling method is to identify your verbs and plant them right after their subjects.

Take a look at this sentence and ask yourself how it could be clearer:

Another problem for e-books that are not simultaneously published in print is that they pose a marketing challenge.

There are three subject-verb pairs in that sentence: “problem … is,” “e-books … are,” and “e-books [they] pose.”

For all three actions, it becomes easy to convey the central ideas more clearly by putting each subject right before its verb:

Another problem is that some e-books pose a marketing challenge: they are not simultaneously published in print.

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two lessons to help you master the parts of speech and parts of a sentence.

We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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One benefit of learning grammar rules is knowing when you can make your own style decisions and still sound credible and professional.

An example is whether you capitalize the word after a colon, as in this sentence about “The Perfect Gelato.”

Mr. Palazzolo’s strawberry and cantaloupe flavors mimic the textures of the fruits themselves: Strawberry gelato is coarse but gives way under a spoon, while cantaloupe has the smoothness of cut melon.

It’s a little old fashioned to capitalize all first words after a colon, but the style is still widely used. In this case, you’d only need to remember to capitalize all ordinary nouns after a colon throughout your entire document.

This style also makes sense because a colon, like a period, is only correct inside a sentence when it follows a word group that could stand on its own as a complete sentence. If you can replace your colon with a period, you’re in the clear.

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to double-check your spelling, punctuation, and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two lessons on punctuation marks, including the colon. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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Numbers and apostrophes confuse many business writers. Here’s a sentence that correctly omits an apostrophe:

The study, led by Northwestern University researchers, followed a large group of men in their 20s.

It’s incorrect to add an apostrophe + -s to make a number plural (e.g., “in their 20’s”).

However, you do add an apostrophe before the number when you name a decade but leave out the century:

Our company was founded back in the ’20s.

In this case, the apostrophe takes the place of the missing numbers you’d type in “the 1920s.”

Remember that decades with apostrophes are just like the contractions can’t for cannot or isn’t for is not.

The apostrophe in “founded in the ’20s” stands for missing numbers, just as apostrophes in contractions stand for missing letters.

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to double-check your spelling and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two lessons on punctuation marks, including the apostrophe.

We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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Complete trust in your spell-checker can land you in trouble. Here’s a New York Times article with two words that should be a single word:

A comprehensive survey released last month … revealed that while the publishing industry had expanded over all, publishers’ mass-market paperback sales had fallen 14 percent since 2008.

An overall success is far more modest than triumphing over all competitors. Spell-checkers can’t recognize this kind of context in your sentences. That’s why it’s important to carefully proofread your documents, testing them word by word.

Spell-checkers save time, but they require patience. Clicking Ignore All once too often in a Word file can mean that repeated misspellings remain in your published document.

Misspellings can distract your readers and diminish your credibility. But careful spell-checking and proofreading can help you keep your readers’ attention and their respect.

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to double-check your spelling and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on commonly misspelled and misused words, including twelve proofreading tips.

We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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It’s usually best to use the active voice in business writing, but the passive voice can be appropriate when it doesn’t matter who performs an action.

Here are two sentences from an article about how everyone can ripen and store plums:

Plums can be ripened easily if left in an open paper bag at room temperature. When ripe, plums can be eaten immediately or stored in the refrigerator.

The passive voice is OK for these highlighted verbs because the article doesn’t focus on how you, the reader, can ripen plums. However, the active voice makes sense more quickly and adds more energy to the sentences:

You can ripen plums easily: leave them in an open paper bag at room temperature. When plums are ripe, you can eat them immediately or store them in the refrigerator.

Passive language is usually best when you describe the actions of team members whose individuality is less important than the actions (“The test tubes were sealed”).

Active language works best for instructions (“Next, seal the test tubes”) and almost all other writing.

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to keep your writing as correct, concise, and clear as it should be? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

Write It Well’s books Professional Writing Skills and Essential Grammar include sections on active and passive language.

We’ve made all the Essential Grammar exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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