Write It Well

While Burberry joined many designers in live-streaming its show online, it was the first brand to also do it in 3-D. Crowds packed the London show at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, but viewers in five cities around the world were also able to sit in the front row: the show was live-streamed in 3-D to Tokyo, New York, Paris, Dubai, and Los Angeles, where viewers donned special Burberry 3-D glasses.

— Isabel Wilkinson, “The Best of London Fashion Week,”

“Burberry Prorsum” page, The Daily Beast, February 24, 2010

Sometimes, perfect punctuation isn’t enough to make a sentence perfectly clear. Rewriting is the best answer.

Take this last sentence. Viewers in all five cities probably got the 3-D glasses, but the excellent punctuation still leaves you guessing whether the glasses were a perk of being in L.A.

We’d suggest this revision for clarity:

Crowds packed the London show at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. The show was live-streamed in 3-D to Tokyo, New York, Paris, Dubai, and Los Angeles, enabling all these viewers around the world to don special Burberry 3-D glasses and sit in the front row.

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For more guidelines on how to use commas correctly and confidently and write crystal-clear sentences, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide, which will ship on March 5th!

“For decades, the drug-resistant germ called MRSA was almost exclusively a concern of humans…. But in recent years, the germ has become a growing problem for veterinarians, with an increasing number of infections turning up in birds, cats, dogs, horses, pigs, rabbits and rodents….”

“For protection, Dr. Oehler recommends hand washing or using hand gels before and after playing with a pet, not letting a pet lick people around the face, and not washing pet food or water bowls in the same sink that food is prepared in.”

– Brenda Goodman, “Tie to Pets Has Germ Jumping to and Fro,”
New York Times online, September 21, 2009

Do you see how Goodman uses commas in two different ways here? She leaves out a final comma in “pigs, rabbits and rodents.” Yet she does add a final comma before “and” in the last sentence.

Why? Because the Associated Press tells journalists to use commas in different ways for different kinds of lists. The last sentence isn’t a list of simple items like birds and rodents. The final list item includes a conjunction of its own: “not washing pet food or water bowls in the same sink that food is prepared in.” The list of three complex items would be confusing without a final comma before the list’s main conjunction: “and.”

We recommend that most writers always add a comma before the conjunction in all lists of three or more items. (Not “The flag is red, white and blue,” but “The flag is red, white, and blue.”) Then you’ll never have to ask yourself if you need another comma to make your meaning clear.

For more tips about commas, see Write It Well’s book Professional Writing Skills: A Self-Paced Training Program.

“As with any public health intervention, the precise effect of a tax cannot be known until it is implemented and studied, but research to date suggests that a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages would have strong positive effects on reducing consumption.”  – Kelly D. Brownell, PhD, et al., “The Public Health and Economic Benefits of Taxing Sugar-Sweetened Beverages,” New England Journal of Medicine online, September 16, 2009

This sentence was taken from an article about taxing sugary drinks. Don’t you think that the quotation is longer than it needs to be?  We do   We re-wrote it this way:

“Of course it is difficult to predict, but research suggests that if sugary beverages were taxed, the public would drink less of them and would be healthier.”

 For more tips about writing clearly and concisely, see Write It Well’s book Professional Writing Skills: A Self-Paced Training Program.