Write It Well

It can confuse readers to see inconsistent styles across one organization’s documents. Editorial style guides can solve that problem. They’re collections of rules for all employees to follow – ensuring a standard quality for all the writing an organization sends out.

This weekend, someone at the New York Times website mixed two capitalization styles in one article link. “Case Study” is a regular feature in nytimes.com’s T Magazine, and “Rhubarb Syrup” is an article by its author. The lowercase s in the ad on the top clashes with the Times‘s style guide. It’s inconsistent with both the linked article and even the words immediately before it.

A style guide lays a solid groundwork for an organization’s consistent identity. Once a style guide is distributed, careful proofreading keeps the organization’s image crisp and coherent.

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For guidelines on parallel style in lists and sentences, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

Write It Well offers proofreading and editing services for your own or your employees’ writing. Just send us a sample document, noting any concerns or goals you have for it. We’ll copyedit a sample portion for free and return it within two days.

You’ll get estimates of the cost and time frame for our sending you back a full, edited document that will make a great impression.

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These criteria translate into actions. Here’s our checklist of actions that effective business writers take:

• State the main point clearly, right at the beginning
• Organize information logically
• Leave out unnecessary information
• Use short sentences and paragraphs
• Eliminate unnecessary words
• Include all necessary information
• Use active, precise language and plain English
• Use correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling

Any time you get confused or distracted as you read, ask yourself if the writer neglected one of these criteria. Or if you ever feel lost as you’re writing, assemble your ideas by taking these actions.

Most business readers will only give a document about fifteen seconds to catch their attention. When readers’ time is valuable, the rest of the document has to hold their attention. The best way to make sure people read your whole document is to focus your message and then deliver it in clear, logical, correct language.

So take the time to think about your readers’ needs, organize your information logically, and present it clearly. Easy-to-grasp language and correct grammar and punctuation will keep your readers focused on your message. Considering these criteria and taking these actions will boost your professional image and credibility.

Here is a  simple way to use commas to write crystal-clear sentences when you need your reader to understand items in a series (lists of three or more things).  Without any commas, three or more items in a series run into one another. The result is confusing.

Joe’s first assignments will be to clean the shelves move the filing cabinets put the books in alphabetical order and take the outdated files to the warehouse.

Commas make it clear that each item in the series — in this case, four activities — is separate from the other items.

Joe’s first assignments will be to clean the shelves, move the filing cabinets, put the books in alphabetical order, and take the outdated files to the warehouse.

“Red, white, and blue” is an example of three items in a series. The most common conjunctions for items in a series are the words and and or.

One of the most common punctuation questions is whether to use a comma before the final conjunction in a series of three or more items. This punctuation is sometimes called the serial or series comma.

Without series comma: The store has the shirt in red, blue, green and yellow.

With series comma: The store has the shirt in red, blue, green, and yellow.

In fact, there is no hard-and-fast rule about including or omitting the series comma. Some organizations have rules requiring that you always use the series comma or that you avoid it. Very few journalists use the series comma because omitting it saves column space.

If your organization doesn’t have this rule, we recommend always using the series comma. It makes your writing clearer and makes your life simpler. If you always use the series comma, you’ll never have to pause and ask yourself if your reader will grasp your meaning, and you’ll always be correct.

One more thing: remember that the series comma always goes before the conjunction, and never after it.

Incorrect: Send the company treasurer your last three pay stubs, a copy of your federal tax return and, copies of any form 1099s you might have received.

Correct: Send the company treasurer your last three pay stubs, a copy of your federal tax return, and copies of any form 1099s you might have received.

Finally, here are some sentences without the series comma. Try inserting the series comma in these sentences.

1. The doctor said the condition’s symptoms include itching, hunger and thirst.

2. There are three new team members: Erin Copland, Jennifer Steinblum and Pat Jonas.

3. The valedictorian thanked his parents, Ms. Brown and Mr. Weir.

Next, you’ll find the same three sentences with the series comma. We think you’ll agree that the series comma helps clarify the meaning of each sentence.

1. The doctor said the condition’s symptoms include itching, hunger, and thirst.

2. There are three new team members: Erin Copland, Jennifer Steinblum, and Pat Jonas.

3. The valedictorian thanked his parents, Ms. Brown, and Mr. Weir.

Without the series comma, Sentence 3 could refer to the valedictorian’s thanking either two or four people. The reader is left guessing whether or not Ms. Brown and Mr. Weir are the valedictorian’s parents. The series comma makes it clear that the valedictorian thanked four people.

A large multinational corporation hired Write It Well to look for ways to improve the corporation’s e-mail communication. As part of our engagement, we conducted an internal survey to learn how their employees use e-mail. Here’s what we found.

Sometimes e-mail helps us get our job done more efficiently and effectively, but it can be a clumsy tool. 65 percent of employees waste between two and six hours each week using e-mail unproductively.

The majority of users defined a “good” e-mail as being concise, getting straight to the point, using plain English, and including a signature with contact information. Respondents overwhelmingly agreed that a “bad” e-mail is long, confusing, and has a main point buried in the text.

Here are five ways to improve e-mail communication:

1. Determine your purpose for writing and state your main point clearly at the beginning of the message. You always have a purpose for writing – it’s either to inform someone about something, or to influence someone to do something. Once you’ve determined your purpose, it’s much easier to isolate and state your e-mail’s main point.
2. Delete any unnecessary information. Ask yourself what information your audience members already know, and what new information they need to hear from you. If any information is not absolutely necessary, leave it out of your e-mail.
3. Use plain English and avoid jargon. Our motto at Write It Well is that “You’ll impress people with the clarity of your message, not the big words you use.” Same thing with jargon: it’s as easy to show off with technical terms as it is with ten-dollar vocabulary words. Clear writing is more impressive than either one.
4. Include a signature with your contact information. Always include your name and phone number. You can also include your company name, title, physical address, fax number, Web site address, cellphone number, etc.
5. Avoid BCC, use CC cautiously, and be very careful with the Reply All button. We’ve worked with thousands of professionals and have heard hundreds of horror stories about BCC, which has a tendency to backfire. Lots of people use CC incorrectly, too. Remember that if you CC someone, you don’t expect a reply. Also, the CC recipient should feel comfortable filing the message and reading it at his/her convenience. if you need a prompt reply, put the recipient’s name in the To line. Finally, use Reply All judiciously. No one wants extra mail!

Also, remember to pick up the phone whenever an e-mail exchange becomes too complicated, confusing, or otherwise ineffective.

Read our book E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide for many more tips on writing effective subject lines, sending attachments, planning your message, using the correct salutation and closing, and using correct grammar and punctuation.

When sending rapid-fire e-mails back and forth across the office, it’s fine to write one-line messages. Those messages don’t even have to be complete sentences. When you know your audience well, sentence fragments can be efficient and effective. Take a look at these very effective incomplete sentences:

• To consider at today’s meeting: deadlines, deadlines, deadlines.
• Monday, March 6–OK.
• Sure–when we get budget approval.

Just be sure to be quite clear. Sentence fragments can be ambiguous, sound overly blunt, or give your reader the impression that your message isn’t important. Like I wrote in my previous post, sometimes saving space wastes time. Just keep your audience clearly in view.

For more tips on keeping e-mail efficient and effective with sentence fragments, check out chapter four in E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide.

“Most people could cut their email output by ten percent or so and maintain or even increase their productivity,” writes Art Carden. Messages to cut:

• Questions you could answer for yourself. See what Google has to say before you send an e-mail that makes you look silly and wastes time.
• Responses to e-mails that CC you. Often, these e-mails are just informative, and don’t need an answer from you.
• Forwards. Yes, it’s a noble cause. So why don’t you take the time to compose your own personal, thought-provoking e-mail, and send THAT to your friends? They’ll appreciate it much more.

E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide has more great tips on boosting your e-mail effectiveness.

Some e-mail clients let you mark your e-mail as “urgent” or “high-priority.” Generally, you’re better off using a descriptive subject line to get your reader’s attention. An e-mail marked “URGENT” looks loud and pushy. Every now and then, loud and pushy may be exactly what you need. But don’t let yourself get comfortable with sending urgent messages (or crying wolf, for that matter) — it doesn’t look particularly professional.

Be especially careful when you forward an “urgent” e-mail. Your forward will also be marked “urgent,” when it probably isn’t.

I can spend hours composing careful e-mails, and minutes deciding whether to archive an e-mail or leave it in my inbox. If e-mail takes up too much of your time, try these tricks for keeping it under control:

• Decide how often you’ll check your e-mail, and stick to it. If necessary, shut down your e-mail application so it doesn’t alert you when new e-mail arrives.
• Use e-mail as a transitional activity between meetings or other tasks. That way, you can’t spend too much time on any one e-mail task.
• Plan your schedule so you check your e-mail while having coffee, or just before lunch, when you’re hungry. This trick helps me stay alert, eager to finish, and decisive.

For more tips on managing e-mail, check out Chapter 3 in E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide.

From e-mail to blog posts to website content, much of our business writing these days is “clickable.” There are several ways to put links in your text. Which linking style looks most professional? I’m not going to focus on the technical part of making links — which is usually as simple as clicking a menu button. Instead, I’m going to talk about the phrasing.

One of the ugliest ways to include a link is this: CLICK HERE!! By all means, avoid the words “click here,” and particularly avoid capital letters. Readers know how to follow a link. Saying “click here” (1) wastes words, (2) doesn’t tell the reader anything about the linked site, and (3) smacks of spam advertising.

The more contemporary understated version of “CLICK HERE” is to incorporate direction words into the flow of your text. For example: You can find a linguistics blog here, and food writers here, here, and here. While much better than “click here,” direction-word links are a little bit coy: they force the reader to click on them before knowing exactly where they lead. In informal contexts, they’re acceptable, but don’t rely on “here” when writing something really impressive.

The best way to format links is to incorporate them unobtrusively in the sentence. For your link text, choose a word or phrase that refers specifically to the topic of the linked page. For example, link a company name to its website, link a confusing word to its Wikipedia page, and link to any reference when you mention it. Should you link the whole phrase? Or just the main word? That’s up to you. Just be consistent.

One more thing: avoid putting two different links next to each other. A reader won’t necessarily know that each word goes to a separate page!

How to start? Liz Danzico, the information architect and blogger at Bobulate, thinks that e-mail salutations have three basic purposes. In “Anatomy of a Salutation,”  she writes that salutations not only function as greetings, but set tone and establish a hierarchy between writers. More interesting, she notes that e-mail salutations evolve fairly quickly during back-and-forth correspondence. Most e-mail threads start out formal (“Dear Professor Miles”), but by the third e-mail the correspondents often drop to an informal “Hi,” or no greeting at all.

When writing a salutation, follow your correspondent’s cues. You’ll look stuffy and cold if you return a “Hey Charlie” with a “Dear Mr. Bowers,” and you could easily insult someone by using only their first  name. I like to check my correspondents signatures — if they sign only a first name, I can use only their first name, and if they sign their full name, I address them by their title and last name.

For more advice on writing business e-mail, check out E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide.