Write It Well

That’s the title of a Harvard Business Review blog post by a CEO named Kyle Wiens. He does his best to prevent his employees from sending out “groan-worthy” errors in documents that represent his company.

Wiens is right: sloppy writing can undermine an organization’s credibility. However, we also know from thirty years’ experience that job seekers and employees really can master core professional writing techniques.

Bad writing can sabotage a job hunt, a team’s high-stakes proposal, or a routine performance review. But businesspeople can also learn strategies for using all writing as a tool to project a professional image and get the results they need!

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The Write It Well Series on Business Communication helps managers and employees avoid writing mistakes and send out professional-caliber documents.

Here are just a few writing challenges that our trainings and our books and e-books can help you master:

• Polish your essential grammar and punctuation skills
• Plan and draft documents that project a professional image and fit your business needs
• Write effective email that saves time, gets to the point, and gets results
• Write clear, specific, results-focused performance reviews
• Land a job by writing cover letters and resumes that fit your skills and an organization’s hiring needs

Missing punctuation can confuse your customers and clients. Clear punctuation may take some extra effort, but it helps readers follow your ideas and realize you care about being understood.

Some sentences are simple enough not to need commas — e.g., to use a Wall Street Journal writer’s example, “Beets are available throughout the year but their flesh is particularly flavorful when the weather warms.”

Commas are often necessary to help readers follow your ideas. Here’s another correctly punctuated sentence:

Shaved into paper-thin rounds, spring beets provide an earthy, sharp flavor that’s different from the musky sweetness we have come to expect of the vegetable.

Notice how much harder it is to follow the sentence without the commas:

Shaved into paper-thin rounds spring beets provide an earthy sharp flavor that’s different from the musky sweetness we have come to expect of the vegetable.

Correctly placed commas help you signal readers where one idea ends and another begins. It can take effort to step back from your own thoughts and ask how a sentence will look to a reader, but that effort pays off in clarity.

Correct punctuation helps hold readers’ attention. It also signals that you respect them enough to communicate carefully by trying to think about how they’ll receive your message.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two full, user-friendly chapters on punctuation. 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!

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.

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Readers can get distracted or confused when business writers mix up hyphens and dashes. The following sentences about the new iPad feature a correctly used hyphen and dash:

Any company that wants to make a tablet computer that matches the iPad’s $499 starting price has to endure higher costs. As a result, Apple’s tablet-making competitors have flailed — and failed.

Hyphens (-) are shorter than dashes (—). Hyphens appear most often in two-word phrases that come before a noun and describe it (e.g., “tablet-making competitors”). Think of hyphens as glue that holds two or more words together, uniting their meaning.

Dashes are different from hyphens in two more ways. Dashes are for parts of sentences rather than individual words, and their function is more to separate ideas than to unite them.

Dashes set off a group of words from the rest of a sentence by adding emphasis. A hyphen with spaces around it can’t stand in for a dash. The result looks careless and unpolished, and it can distract readers from your message:

Apple’s tablet-making competitors have flailed - and failed.

When you want to set off a word group, a correctly typed dash adds polish and emphasis to your sentence.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two full, user-friendly chapters on punctuation. 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!

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.

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You might be better off rewriting a sentence if you get confused about how you should punctuate it. Consider this sentence on the Yelp debut:

At an opening price of roughly $22 a share, Yelp is trading at a $1.6 billion valuation —  far smaller than some of the recent Internet offerings, like Zynga or Groupon — but still an impressive debut for a start-up operating in a highly competitive environment that has yet to turn a profit.

The sentence is 51 words long. Most business writers find it easiest to follow sentences that are about half that length.

If you find a sentence going over about 30 words, look for a way to break up your ideas into two or three simpler sentences. Here’s one simpler way to rephrase the ideas above:

At an opening price of roughly $22 a share, Yelp is trading at a $1.6 billion valuation. That valuation is far smaller than some of the recent Internet offerings, like Zynga or Groupon. But it’s still an impressive debut for a start-up operating in a highly competitive environment that has yet to turn a profit.

The three new sentences present the same information much more simply by breaking it down with two breathing spaces. The new periods stop readers from having to take in the opening price, valuation, company comparisons, and the final question of turning a profit all in one breath.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on ways you can keep your sentences easy to follow. 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!

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.

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It’s more important to use a colon correctly than to decide whether you’ll capitalize an ordinary word that follows it. Here’s an example of a correctly used colon in a sentence about the Oscars:

The awards show is working hard to pump up its social-media clout as it tries to leverage a growing phenomenon: More and more viewers are supplementing the experience of merely watching their favorite TV shows by joining in simultaneous running commentaries on Twitter and Facebook.

That sentence is from the Wall Street Journal site; capitalizing all words after a colon is their house style. Style decision aren’t a matter of correct and incorrect language. It’s only important to be consistent by capitalizing each and every word that follows a colon if you capitalize just one in a document.

The optional capital letter after a colon is a reminder of an important fact: a colon should only follow a word group that could stand on its own as a complete sentence.

Many sentences with colons are longer than the maximum length of about 30 words that keeps it easy for a reader to follow a business document. The quoted sentence above is 45 words long.

If you find yourself asking whether you’re using a colon correctly, just try substituting a period for the colon. It’s always correct to write two shorter sentences, and two briefer bursts of information may be easier for your reader to follow.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on ways you can keep your sentences easy to follow. 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!

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.

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Here’s a way you can use punctuation marks as traffic signals, building momentum and steering readers through your ideas.

Dashes call extra attention to the information they set off, and parentheses make information seem less important. Here’s an example:

Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book chain, said on Thursday that it was considering spinning off its Nook e-reader division in an effort to help the nascent — and expensive — digital business grow.

Now compare the effect when parentheses are substituted for the dashes:

Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book chain, said on Thursday that it was considering spinning off its Nook e-reader division in an effort to help the nascent (and expensive) digital business grow.

See how the parentheses make the expense look like a slight detour, while the dashes above make it look as if the writer were passing some especially interesting scenery?

Consciously using dashes and parentheses can help you highlight essential information (and downplay less important information) that you need to convey.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two chapters on punctuation. 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!

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.

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Very few business writers use hyphens correctly in two-word descriptive phrases. Here are some quick tips.

A technology writer adds and omits hyphens perfectly in this sentence:

At the start of this year, app-related search engines and stores were too big a mess for the mobile software industry to leave as is.

Hyphenate most two-word phrases only when they come before a noun.

• as-is software
• the software was left as is
• the app-related search engines
• the search engines are app related

Here are some exceptions to the rule. Don’t add a hyphen when a two-word phrase comes before a noun, but one of these factors applies:

• a two-word noun is well known (e.g., “real estate deal” or “mobile software industry” above)
• the first word is more, less, most, or least
• the first word ends in -ly

Following these hyphenation guidelines gives a rare touch of clarity and polish to business prose.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two chapters on punctuation. 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!

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.

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Here are two simple rules to keep track of commas in complex sentences:

1. Don’t use commas when removing words would change the meaning
2. Do use commas to set off word groups that only add extra details

Here’s a sentence with two correct commas and one incorrect comma:

Whole Foods began a weekly Twitter chat, for an hour every Thursday, to discuss topics such as holiday menu planning, with its followers.

The first two commas are correct because they surround a word group that does not change the sentence meaning. (Taking out those words would leave the intact idea, “Whole Foods began a weekly Twitter chat to discuss topics such as holiday menu planning.”)

The third comma is incorrect because the words “with its followers” are essential to tell the reader who was part of this Whole Foods Twitter discussion.

Since removing the words would leave the company discussing holiday menus with no one, here’s how the sentence should read:

Whole Foods began a weekly Twitter chat, for an hour every Thursday, to discuss topics such as holiday menu planning with its followers.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a full chapter on commas. 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!

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.

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Bulleted lists are an excellent way to present complex business information clearly. Numbered items are better than bulleted items when you need to present an intricate sequence of steps.

This New York Times paragraph is a perfect example of information that cries out for a numbered list; just compare it to the reformatted version below.

Original

If you’re a business owner, a team coach or a performer who wants to keep everyone on Facebook apprised of your coming events, simply creating separate Facebook events for each one can be ineffective. These can get lost in the stream of events, making it hard for people to check for, say, your next game. As an alternative, use the Social Calendar app, which was not developed by Facebook. Go to facebook.com/SocialCalendar and click the Add to My Page link in the lower left corner. That will pop up a menu of pages you manage. Click Add to Page next to one or more pages, then click Close. Those pages will now include a Calendar link in their upper left corner, just below Wall, Info and Photos. Social Calendar is pretty smart — it will autocomplete the names of events you’ve already created, and if you type in an Address field, it will add a map link to the location on the calendar.

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Revised

If you’re a business owner, a team coach or a performer who wants to keep everyone on Facebook apprised of your coming events, simply creating separate Facebook events for each one can be ineffective. These can get lost in the stream of events, making it hard for people to check for, say, your next game. As an alternative, use the Social Calendar app, which was not developed by Facebook:

1. Go to facebook.com/SocialCalendar.

2. Click the Add to My Page link in the lower left corner. That will pop up a menu of pages you manage.

3. Click Add to Page next to one or more pages.

4. Then click Close.

Those pages will now include a Calendar link in their upper left corner, just below Wall, Info and Photos. Social Calendar is pretty smart — it will autocomplete the names of events you’ve already created, and if you type in an Address field, it will add a map link to the location on the calendar.

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In the original paragraph, the instructions are buried in a dense block of text, making it easy for readers to get confused or lost. The numbered list makes a clear sequence of steps stand out immediately.

Customers and clients can appreciate the clear guidance you offer in a chronologically numbered list. A little document planning on your part can boost their relief at your offering hassle-free, well-organized information.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two chapters on punctuation as well as tips for formatting a bulleted or numbered list. 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!

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.

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