The Alexander Communications Group has written an article for its current Customer Communicator newsletter that quotes Write It Well President Natasha Terk on the importance of carefully written e-mail.

The article includes five important questions that professionals should keep in mind as they write e-mail to customers. Check out the article here for more tips on how employees and managers can make sure outgoing e-mail reflects well on their company’s image!

Be cautious about using journalism as a model for your business writing: some excellent journalists use nonstandard English. Here’s a sentence that uses a colon in a nonstandard way.

To take an example of just one classroom convention that might be inhibiting today’s students: teachers and professors regularly ask students to write papers.

— Virginia Heffernan, “Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade,” nytimes.com, August 7, 2011

There’s a simple rule about a colon that follows an introductory thought: only type a colon after an introductory word group that could stand on its own as a complete sentence.

A colon is correct in both the following sentences because the reworded introductory thoughts could both become complete sentences if they were followed by periods instead of colons. The revised words are underlined.

I’ll take an example of just one classroom convention that might be inhibiting today’s students: teachers and professors regularly ask students to write papers.

Here is an example of just one classroom convention that might be inhibiting today’s students: teachers and professors regularly ask students to write papers.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two full chapters on correct 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 untangle your sentences or double-check your punctuation? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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How often do long sentences keep you in suspense before they deliver the second half of an idea?

The following 39-word sentence is an example of how writers can create unnecessary wait times:

What readers, writers, publishers, and retailers really needed to worry about, and catch up with, was the increasing potential of what a book’s content could be, the delivery of the content, and how we could interact with the content.

— Buzz Poole, “Is there hope for books?” Salon.com, August 4, 2011

The sentence’s subject and verb are in orange. The orange pronoun “what” stands for three things, but 14 words separate the pronoun from the verb.

That separation keeps the reader waiting to learn what the three things are. We’d recommend recasting the sentence as two shorter sentences:

There are three things that readers, writers, publishers, and retailers really needed to worry about and catch up with. These three concerns are the increasing potential of what a book’s content could be, the content’s delivery, and how we could interact with the content.

When your readers are busy, it’s best to keep your sentences short — say, 17 to 25 words long.

Short sentences can keep your subjects and verbs clear and also efficiently deliver your meaning to your readers.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a full chapter on sentence structure. 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 untangle your sentences? 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 can help readers follow your ideas as easily as they’d step down a staircase. Here are two illustrations, starting with an intricate sentence about an array of covers you can buy to protect an iPad 2:

There is the shockproof CoverBuddy from SwitchEasy.com, available in 10 colors (plus ultraclear) for $25; the Snap Shield cover from Belkin.com, which comes in clear, Apple Pink and Smoke and sells for $30; the BackBone from ifrogz.com, which sells for $35 in matching Smart Cover colors, plus white and clear; or the higher-end iFrogz Summit for $60, which combines a folio style with a snap-in core.

— Mickey Meece, “Options Abound to Protect the iPad,” nytimes.com, July 6, 2011

The same information is much easier to read when it’s unpacked and reformatted as a bulleted list:

Here are four cover options for the iPad 2:

• The shockproof CoverBuddy from SwitchEasy.com is available in 10 colors (plus ultraclear) for $25
• The Snap Shield cover from Belkin.com sells for $30 and comes in clear, Apple pink and smoke
• The BackBone from ifrogz.com sells for $35 in matching Smart Cover colors, plus white and clear
• The higher-end iFrogz Summit sells for $60 and combines a folio style with a snap-in core

Any time a series of items gets longer than about 30 words, back up and ask yourself if the information would be easier to follow in list format. Your readers may thank you for helping them move forward.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar is a thorough review of the fundamental grammar you need to project credibility, clear thought, and professionalism through all your writing. The book includes two user-friendly chapters on punctuation, tips for using colons correctly in list introductions, and tips to maintain parallel structure inside a list.

Do you have an important document but not enough time to polish it? Just use Write It Well’s editing services. We’ll make sure the prose is correct, clear, concise, and engaging so your readers will follow all your ideas easily and respect your voice.

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People sometimes make punctuation mistakes because they don’t type the way they speak. Here’s an example:

[The view from the rear of the property] displays the canopy of a 150-year-old, live-oak forest.

— “Killingsworth ‘Case Study’ home in Piedmont,” sfgate.com June 10, 2011

That comma is as incorrect as it would be in this parallel sentence: “I saw an old, oak tree.”

Punctuation should often reflect the patterns in how we speak. You wouldn’t pause between the adjectives if you said the words “old oak tree” out loud.

By speaking sentences out loud and trusting your ear, you can usually avoid these kinds of incorrect commas in your own writing.

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Write It Well’s e-learning module Just Commas covers everything business writers need to know to use commas correctly.

Our new book Essential Grammar includes a full chapter on commas. The book is a thorough review of the fundamental grammar you need to project a credible, professional image through your writing.

Do you have an important document but don’t have enough time to polish it? Just use Write It Well’s editing services. We’ll make sure the prose is correct, clear, concise, and engaging so your document will create an excellent impression.

The words that and which give readers crucial signals about information. Here’s an example:

Google Wallet [is a mobile application; consumers use it by waving] their cellphones at a retailer’s terminal to make a payment instead of using a credit card…. The mobile wallet will work at any of the 124,000 merchants [who] accept MasterCard’s PayPass terminals, which take contactless payments, and more than 300,000 merchants outside the United States.

“Google Unveils App for Paying with Phone”

— Tara Siegel Bernard, nytimes.com, May 26, 2011

The word “which” in the quote signals that Google’s app will work at all PayPass terminals. If the sentence read, “terminals that take contactless payments,” then the reader would have no idea whether this new app worked at all PayPass terminals, or only the ones at 124,000 unnamed stores.

You can convey information precisely by always observing these guidelines for using that and which. You can also use these guidelines to build and maintain your reputation as a careful, knowledgeable, reliable business writer.

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Write It Well’s newly updated book Essential Grammar includes further tips on correct pronoun usage as well as nuances of English such as who vs. that that help your writing look especially impressive. The book is a thorough review of the fundamental grammar you need to project a credible, polished, professional image through your writing.

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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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The distinction between “that” and “which” is a little blurry. In many cases, you can interchange them without confusing your reader. Even thoroughly experienced writers switch them around sometimes — the New York Times After Deadline blog this week found examples in the paper where writers had confused “that” and “which”. Of course, readers who know the difference will think a misplaced “which” rather awkward. Try this: which of the following sentences sounds better:

• Mine is the one which has silver fenders
• Mine is the one that has silver fenders

More likely than not, most of us would choose the second sentence. We use “which” when the information that follows isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence. For example:

A Phillies fan asked, “Why can’t us?” on a radio show last Thursday. The Phillies haven’t been to the World Series since 1993, so the wistful, ungrammatical plea was the perfect rallying catchphrase for the team’s fans. Sometimes, “bad” grammar is more effective than “good” grammar. It sounds like blue-collar grit and visits to grandma, which is just fine when we’re talking about good old-fashioned fun like baseball.

We run into problems when we take informal grammar out of context. When people falsely put on blue-collar airs or unnaturally adopt “bad” grammar, they risk sounding incompetent or patronizing.