Write It Well

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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Customers may give up trying to read your prose if you confront them with long-winded blocks of text. Lists can be an easy formatting solution to the challenge of keeping readers’ attention.

Here’s a beautifully formatted list from a New York Times article about a badly designed website:

When conceiving a contest — or any other attempt to drive traffic with user-generated content — it’s important to keep a few things in mind:

•    Make sure the contest aims at an audience of potential and current customers.
•    Give them incentives to contribute (prizes, recognition).
•    Give them reasons to keep coming back (picking daily or monthly winners).
•    Promote the contest through multiple channels (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube).
•    Promote the contest on appropriate travel blogs.
•    Create new contests and promotions on a regular basis.

See how much less appetizing those sentences look in paragraph form?

When conceiving a contest — or any other attempt to drive traffic with user-generated content — it’s important to keep a few things in mind. First, make sure the contest aims at an audience of potential and current customers. Give them incentives to contribute (prizes, recognition). Give them reasons to keep coming back (picking daily or monthly winners). Promote the contest through multiple channels (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). Promote the contest on appropriate travel blogs. And create new contests and promotions on a regular basis.

Even with a sequence of crisp sentences that all start with calls to action, the paragraph format buries the writer’s ideas.

Strategically deployed lists hand your ideas to a reader item by item – making you likelier to hold your reader’s attention through every line.

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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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Business writers can make an especially polished impression by using hyphens and dashes correctly. This sentence shows advanced uses for both punctuation marks:

A study commissioned by HarperCollins in 2010 found that books bought for three- to seven-year-olds were frequently discovered at a local bookstore — 38 percent of the time.

The dash before “38 percent” is perfect because it precedes some surprising information. The writer skillfully uses this dash to emphasize the news that adults are over five times likelier to buy e-books for themselves than for their kids.

Dashes call attention to the words they set off. (And parentheses downplay the information they contain.)

Click here for Write It Well’s guide to using hyphens correctly. And click here for our guide for typing dashes and hyphens correctly.

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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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25 words makes a good maximum length for most business sentences. So what do you do when a sentence starts mushrooming beyond that comfortable target length?

Start by imagining you’d written this 33-word sentence about Adobe’s cloud-computing software:

Larger businesses, particularly over the past decade, have become used to subscribing to software rather than buying it — using Salesforce.com for managing customer relationships, for example, or Box.net for storage and collaboration.

Concise writing can start with rearranging a sentence’s main ideas as a series of bullet points, with one idea per item:

• Particularly over the past decade, larger businesses have changed their software use
• They have become used to subscribing to software rather than buying it
• Two examples are using Salesforce.com for managing customer relationships or Box.net for storage and collaboration.

Teasing out the ideas as separate list items makes them easy to recombine with new transitions:

Particularly over the past decade, larger businesses have become used to subscribing to software rather than buying it. Two examples are using Salesforce.com for managing customer relationships or Box.net for storage and collaboration.

These new sentences are 18 and 17 words long — the perfect length for a busy customer or client to skim, absorb, and move on from.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes one chapter on sentence structure and two more 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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Many customers and clients are reluctant to sacrifice significant time on long sentences in Web copy. Here’s a technique to help readers follow your thoughts more quickly.

The following sentence is correctly punctuated, but slightly hard to follow at 41 words long:

And despite the rebuff by Mr. Jobs to the health care executive, Apple ended up adding a number of business-friendly features — like better support for Microsoft Exchange, a common e-mail system inside companies — to a later software update for the iPhone.

Try breaking those flowing lines of text into a bulleted list with one idea per item:

• Mr. Jobs rebuffed the health care executive
• Yet Apple ended up adding a number of business-friendly features to a later software update for the iPhone
• One example was better support for Microsoft Exchange, a common e-mail system inside companies

Reframing these ideas as separate list items sharpens their logic and makes them easy to reassemble as two clear, user-friendly sentences:

Mr. Jobs rebuffed the health care executive, yet Apple ended up adding a number of business-friendly features to a later software update for the iPhone. One example was better support for Microsoft Exchange, a common e-mail system inside companies.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes one chapter on sentence structure and two more 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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Concision pays off in business writing. The following 45-word question lists six separate San Francisco cafes; it’s about twice the length most sentences should be in marketing or blog copy:

Did their coffee bar and roastery, called Sightglass (after the window in the roaster for checking on the beans), stand a chance in a city that already had Ritual, Four Barrel, and Blue Bottle, not to mention old-timer Graffeo in North Beach and granddaddy-gone-mainstream Peet’s?

It’s easy for your ideas to stretch out and get tangled when you’re writing under a deadline. To detangle a sentence quickly, rearrange it as a bulleted list:

• Their coffee bar and roastery is called Sightglass.
• The name is from the roaster window for checking on the beans.
• Does Sightglass stand a chance in a city crowded with cafes?
• The city already had Ritual, Four Barrel, and Blue Bottle, not to mention old-timer Graffeo in North Beach and granddaddy-gone-mainstream Peet’s.

A list is an extremely clear format for presenting a series of facts that follow an introductory statement. Since there is no introductory, framing idea here, it’s necessary to reassemble these list items in paragraph form.

Here’s one way to do it. These two 17- and 24-word sentences are much easier for a busy reader to sip at than the big-gulp 45-word sentence above:

Their coffee bar and roastery is called Sightglass, after the roaster window for checking on the beans. Did Sightglass stand a chance in a city that already had Ritual, Four Barrel, Blue Bottle, old-timer Graffeo in North Beach, and granddaddy-gone-mainstream Peet’s?

Try using a list when you need to present intricate information concisely and clearly. A list can help you identify your thoughts, contain them in neater punctuation, and hand them to your reader in easy-to-grasp informational servings.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes one chapter on sentence structure and two more 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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Cookbooks can teach business writers a thing or two about presenting ideas clearly.

Take a look at this slightly revised, 38-word sentence about iPad cooking apps. It’s about twice the length it should be for comfortable reading:

Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy['s] book, The Geometry of Pasta, illustrated entirely in crisp black and white, with all pasta shapes drawn true to size, met Ms. Hildebrand’s goal of designing a visually informative cookbook without any photographs.

Try treating this sentence the way you’d write out the ingredients for a recipe. First, chop the flowing lines of text into a bulleted list with one item per idea:

• Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy’s book is The Geometry of Pasta
• It’s illustrated entirely in crisp black and white, with all pasta shapes drawn true to size
• It met Ms. Hildebrand’s goal of designing a visually informative cookbook without any photographs

Once you cut and assemble these related ideas, it’s easy to blend and remix them. 26 and 14 words make for a more appetizing presentation than the single 38-word heap of a sentence above:

Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy book, The Geometry of Pasta, is illustrated entirely in crisp black and white with all pasta shapes drawn true to size. It met Ms. Hildebrand’s goal of designing a visually informative cookbook without any photographs.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes one chapter on sentence structure and two more 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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