Write It Well

Correctly used semicolons signal that you know English well, and want to help your readers follow the logic of your sentences.

Here’s an illustration. It’s from an excellent writer’s interview with the editor of a magazine that had just been redesigned:

“Joe and I both loved the old New Republic,” [editor Franklin Foer] says. “We felt that we were drawing on a really rich aesthetic tradition; magazines used to know how to make type look beautiful.”

– Emily Gordon, “Primary Colors,” Print magazine, November/December 2007

In other words, the New Republic‘s rich, individual design tradition stretches back to 1914; many magazines from the early twentieth century still look beautiful.

Foer knows that the second fact doesn’t follow automatically from the first. That’s what makes Gordon’s semicolon perfect.

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Check out our new, one-page PDF “Semicolons: A Write It Well Guide”!

And for a thorough guide to punctuation in business writing, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

Could you use some help making sure your punctuation is correct, and your prose is engaging and easy to understand? Write It Well offers proofreading and editing servicesfor your or your employees’ business documents.

Just send us a document, noting any concerns or goals you have for it – e.g., whether the reader gets enough information from the text to understand your message. 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, engaging document that will make a great impression.

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This description of a two-million-dollar loft in Barcelona provides a good example of when to use a semicolon rather than a colon: “The windows are also original, as are the wooden-beamed ceilings; in the main living area, they are 16 feet high.”

– Virginia C. McGuire, “”House Hunting in … Barcelona,”

New York Times, Aug. 17, 2010

This semicolon is right for this sentence because the ceiling’s height doesn’t depend on its woodwork. But it makes sense to collect these loosely related topics in one sentence because together, they explain why the apartment gets beautiful light.

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Check out our new, one-page PDF “Semicolons: A Write It Well Guide”!

And for a thorough guide to punctuation in business writing, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

Could you use some help making sure your punctuation is correct, and your prose is engaging and easy to understand? Write It Well offers proofreading and editing servicesfor your or your employees’ business documents.

Just send us a document, noting any concerns or goals you have for it – e.g., whether the reader gets enough information from the text to understand your message. 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, engaging document that will make a great impression.

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Here’s a great use of a semicolon to describe changes in the Supreme Court.

James Fallows points out that from 1789 “until 1970, the average tenure of a justice was under 15 years; since then, it’s over 26 years.”

– from “Modest Proposal: Fixed Tenure for the Supreme Court,”

the Atlantic, Aug. 7, 2010

Fallows describes the reasons for this change in other sentences. (Compared to previous centuries, justices are now younger when they join the court, and they live longer.)

A colon would be correct if this sentence showed cause and effect: “Change was inevitable: a new situation would emerge.”

The semicolon is perfect here since Fallows is simply saying, “This is how it used to be; things are different now.”

•

Check out our new, one-page PDF “Semicolons: A Write It Well Guide”!

And for a thorough guide to punctuation in business writing, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

Could you use some help making sure your punctuation is correct, and your prose is engaging and easy to understand? Write It Well offers proofreading and editing servicesfor your or your employees’ business documents.

Just send us a document, noting any concerns or goals you have for it – e.g., whether the reader gets enough information from the text to understand your message. 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, engaging document that will make a great impression.

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Here are two writing techniques to keep your reader’s attention.

A blogger recommends strategies to improve “attention fitness” in “How to Rebuild Your Attention Span and Focus” (lifehacker.com, July 27, 2010). The following headings represent ways Clay Johnson changed his computer habits to boost his attention span:

• Ditched the second monitor
• Turned the mouse off during work time
• Created a proactive routine
• The environment around me

The fourth heading is vague, and it disrupts the sequence of verbs. Precise language and parallel form are two strategies to hook a reader’s eye and keep it on your prose. We’d use them to reword this heading to be “Minimized environmental distractions.”

Johnson focused his own attention by wearing noise-canceling headphones, eating healthy snacks, and consolidating meetings. You can focus your reader’s attention by using precise language and structuring your lists with parallel verbs.

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For tips on parallel structure, list organization, and paragraph sequencing, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

Have you ever looked at a document so long that it becomes hard to see it clearly? Write It Well offers proofreading and editing services for your writing or your employees’ writing.

Just send us a document, noting any concerns or goals you have for it – e.g., whether the reader gets enough information from the text to understand your message. 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, engaging document that will make a great impression.

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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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Inconsistent or sloppy writing can distract your readers. Distracted readers may find something else to pay attention to.

Here’s some inconsistent formatting in a list of today’s most popular articles on the New Yorker website:

Either these underlined letters should be lowercased, or the circled letters should be capitalized. This small inconsistency could distract a reader from the content long enough to think of another site to go read, or another activity that’s more urgent than reading anything.

That’s one reason it’s smart to save time to proofread your business’s writing, even with limited staff and tight deadlines. Consistent, good writing always makes your message more compelling.

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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.

And consider using Write It Well’s proofreading and editing services for your own or your employees’ writing. Just click the more info/contact us button on our homepage to 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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Twitter: A Write It Well Guide is an interactive, three-page PDF with tips businesspeople can use to maintain a professional tone on Twitter.

You’ll find suggestions for framing a 140-character Twitter post and for brainstorming several kinds of business tweets.

We also recommend several excellent online sources about Twitter, with the citations linked directly to the Web. View and download the full PDF!

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It’s dangerous to rely on a computer to catch all your spelling mistakes. Check out this typo in a recent newspaper headline:

Photo by Flickr user ConanTheLibrarian

Of course, “sirs” should be “stirs.” Gentlemen is also the usual plural of sir, but the spelling “sirs” slips through most spell-checkers.

When any business overlooks important typos, its official voice instantly looks less reliable. It always pays off to invest time in careful writing and careful review of any document before you send it out.

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For guidelines on correct grammar and punctuation in business writing, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

And consider using Write It Well’s proofreading and editing services for your own or your employees’ writing. Just click the more info/contact us button on our homepage to 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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It’s usually best to avoid all-capital typing for e-mails, text messages, and tweets. It looks like you’re shouting. But check out these two tweets from the New Yorker, about an hour apart, with the time frames of  ”coming up” and then “NOW“:

Is college worth the price?:http://tny.com/cxoTFm; join the live chat at 12 ET, or ask a question now:http://tny.com/b2nZcR

Is college worth the price? Join our live chat RIGHT NOW:http://tny.com/b2nZcR

Twitter updates constantly. This uppercase “RIGHT NOW” is a case of genuine urgency: join in now, or lose out! If you followed the New Yorker‘s tweets, you’d see they’re carefully written and that this is almost the only uppercase typing they use for an entire page.

We’d say that if you regularly write clear, well-planned tweets, then some all-caps writing is fine. Just deploy it very strategically. If you save uppercase typing to highlight rare, urgent situations, then you won’t look like you’re crying (or tweeting) wolf!

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For a fun, unique case of all-capital tweeting, see FEMINIST HULK‘s page on Twitter.

Also see our post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more suggestions about maintaining a professional sound on the site. And later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post!