Write It Well

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.

•

•

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.

•

•

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.

•

•

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.

•

•

Repeating the same part of speech can help busy readers understand you faster. This list of adjectives by David Pogue is a breeze to read:

Windows Phone 7.5 is gorgeous, classy, satisfying, fast and coherent.

This list of nouns is almost as easy to follow:

Each [tile] represents something you’ve put there for easy access: an app, a speed-dial entry, a Web page, a music playlist or an e-mail folder.

And these verbs hand readers an easy series of actions:

[The phone is] great at understanding its Big Four commands: Call, Text, Find (on the Web) and Open (an app).

Breakdowns in parallel verb structure are the bane of many business writers (e.g., “I should do four things: call Kim, text Joe, finding my wallet, and open an account”).

It’s necessary to keep verbs in the same tense (“call Kim, text Joe, find my wallet, and open an account”) to help readers zip through your prose.

•

•

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes chapters on verbs and 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 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.

•

•

The following sentence about Apple computers very elegantly demonstrates how dashes set off information in a sentence:

How did he take a commodity — to borrow from the novelist Tom Wolfe, the “veal gray” plastic boxes that once weighed so heavily on both our desks and spirits — and turn it into one of the most iconic and desirable objects on the planet?

— business analyst James B. Stewart, “How Steve Jobs Infused Passion into a Commodity,” nytimes.com, October 7, 2011

The core of the sentence amounts to, “How did he take a commodity and turn it into an iconic, desirable object?” The dashes surround and emphasize a quote that explains why that transformation was remarkable.

We’ve written before about the uses of dashes. When you master the basics of grammar and punctuation, you can design your own sentences to deliver the precise meanings you need your readers to grasp.

Studying the basic mechanics of the sentence is one of the most effective ways to craft prose that will inspire your clients and customers.

•

•

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two chapters on punctuation and another on sentence mechanics. You’ll learn how to write for maximum clarity and impact in all your business documents.

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.

•

•

This correctly punctuated sequence of sentences about the iPhone 4S is a perfect illustration of how you can avoid a comma splice:

Apple introduced its long-awaited new iPhone on Tuesday. But it wasn’t an iPhone 5. That will have to wait.

Those last two sentences would be incorrect if they were connected only with a comma:

Apple introduced its long-awaited new iPhone on Tuesday. But it wasn’t an iPhone 5, that will have to wait.

That sentence is a comma splice: two clauses, each of which could stand as an independent sentence, incorrectly joined with a comma.

When you have two clauses that could stand as independent sentences, you’ll always be safe if you use any of these other methods to join them:

A Semicolon:

Apple introduced its long-awaited new iPhone on Tuesday. But it wasn’t an iPhone 5; that will have to wait.

A Comma and a Conjunction:

Apple introduced its long-awaited new iPhone on Tuesday. But it wasn’t an iPhone 5, since that will have to wait.

A Semicolon, Linking Word, and Comma:

Apple introduced its long-awaited new iPhone on Tuesday. It wasn’t an iPhone 5; unfortunately, that will have to wait.

Or, of course, you could just make each independent clause its own sentence, as in the original example.

•

•

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.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two chapters on punctuation to help you boost the impact of all your business documents.

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!

•

•

Casual business writing can be tricky: how can you make your Web copy sound welcoming, yet professionally credible? If you’re concerned that your prose may sound sloppy rather than casual, grammar rules can offer you some safe and reliable guidelines.

Here are some nonstandard sentences in a pleasant T magazine article about Blue Bottle Coffee. The magazine’s handwritten text emphasizes the quotes’ intentional informality:

Since the first line is a question, standard English would require a comma after the name. Of course, the first words of the sentences would also be capitalized.

A businessperson might frown at the grammar of that last sentence if it were part of a formal commercial mission statement. Here’s a revised, correct sentence about coffee: “It makes us smarter, funnier, and healthier, and it is delicious.”

A little knowledge of parallel verb structure is all you’d need to dress up the informal look of this prose and feel sure that it’s appropriate for a formal business document.

•

•

Do you have an important document but not enough time to double-check your punctuation or untangle your sentences? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a section on parallel verb structure and two full 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!

•

•

You’re not alone if you find it difficult to decide whether to write some terms as one word or two.

Language is constantly evolving — usually in the direction of turning two-word terms into single words. Here are two terms that debuted in the ’80s:

As for your cellphone, if you’re not a Verizon user, set up a voice mail password and use it.

Ron Lieber, “Your Phone May Be Less Secure Than You Thought,” nytimes.com, August 19, 2011

Merriam-Webster publishes authoritative dictionaries and an up-to-date website. The company lists cell phone as two words and voice mail as two words.

Webster’s lists Web site as two words, but it also lists website as an accepted spelling. Since many two-word terms melt together over time, the widely recognized terms voicemail and cellphone make perfect sense as one-word terms.

You can find the Webster’s site by typing m-w.com. Remembering the spelling “m-w” can help you feel secure about any spelling and word choices you make.

Using Webster’s spellings is always safe when you’re writing a formal document. The way you spell voicemail matters far less in a business proposal than your spelling words like effect and affect correctly.

•

•

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on commonly confused and misspelled words. 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 and spelling? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

•

•

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.

•

•

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.

•

•

Some brilliant writers are terrible role models to imitate when you write your business documents. This beautiful passage about e-mail manners includes a bush-league grammar mistake:

In some instances, we are told that our e-mail went into spam, a statement that activates either our inner skeptic or our sympathy. (“It’s the permissible white lie,” Ms. McKean said. “It’s the equivalent of ‘I can’t go to your party, I came down with food poisoning.’”)

— Henry Alford, “When Your E-Mail Goes Unanswered,” nytimes.com, July 15, 2011

That orange comma creates a comma splice — a run-on sentence that could be corrected with a period or colon.

This writer can get away with a nonchalant comma splice because the rest of his prose is carefully crafted and error free. His grammar error is a conscious choice to strike an informal tone. But a comma splice in a high-stakes business document could make an educated stranger think you’re simply uninformed or careless.

Thorough grammar knowledge helps your writing project reliability. Building up your grammar knowledge is an ideal way avoid mistakes, maintain your professional credibility, and earn some confident elegance of your own.

•

•

Write It Well’s e-learning module Just Commas includes self-paced quizzes to help you test your knowledge of punctuation, and our 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 double-check your punctuation? Just use Write It Well’s editing services.

We’ll make sure your prose is correct, clear, concise, and engaging so your readers will follow all your ideas easily and respect your voice.

•

•

Careless writing can confuse your readers even when it sounds perfectly clear to you. Correct punctuation can prevent this confusion.

Careless punctuation leaves this article title unclear:

“No Pseudonyms Allowed: Is Google Plus’s Real Name Policy a Good Idea?” Audrey Watters, nytimes.com, July 12, 2011

Adding a hyphen makes the article topic immediately clear: “Google Plus’s Real-Name Policy.” This hyphen is also grammatically necessary.

Without a hyphen, it’s not clear if the article topic is the company’s real policy about names. The hyphen makes it immediately clear that the policy concerns real names as opposed to pseudonyms.

It pays to spend some time and effort on your punctuation: readers will grasp your ideas immediately, and they’ll see you as a effortlessly clear communicator.

•

•

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar is a thorough review of the punctuation rules you need to project credibility, clear thought, and professionalism through all your writing.

The book includes two user-friendly chapters on punctuation, including hyphenation guidelines that enable you to project an especially polished image as a business writer.

Do you have an important document but not enough time to polish it or boost reader comprehension? 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.

•

•