Write It Well

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!

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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Have you ever felt drained just looking at an e-mail that was one long, unbroken paragraph of text? A long sentence can have the same intimidating effect. Here’s an example about the short battery life of the iPhone 4S:

For now, Apple isn’t saying anything about the issue – a spokeswoman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment – in what has become a typical pattern of silence for the company after customers begin complaining about a technical problem with a new iPhone.

The sentence is 42 words long; we recommend that you keep most sentences in business documents under about 25 words. Breaking up the sentence into separate ideas can help you rewrite it:

• For now, Apple isn’t saying anything about the issue
• A spokeswoman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment
• This has become a typical pattern of silence for the company
• Customers have complained before about a technical problem with a new iPhone

This separation of ideas makes it much easier to create two or more shorter sentences with new transitions between the ideas:

For now, Apple isn’t saying anything about the issue; a spokeswoman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. This has become a typical pattern of silence for the company when customers complain about a technical problem with a new iPhone.

Busy readers appreciate having a clear path marked out for them, and these 18- and 22-word sentences are much easier to follow.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a 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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Short sentences tend to be easier for writers to punctuate correctly and easier for busy readers to follow.

Here’s a sentence that’s correctly punctuated but could still slow readers down because it’s 46 words long:

Last year, the Olive Center released a surprising study, based on laboratory and sensory testing, that found that 69 percent of imported extra-virgin olive oils — including big brands like Bertolli, Filippo Berio and Carapelli — bought off the shelves of California supermarkets failed to meet international standards.

You don’t need to keep a careful eye on wandering verb phrases and nonessential clauses when you limit each sentence to two or three ideas:

Last year, the Olive Center released a surprising study based on laboratory and sensory testing. Researchers found that 69 percent of imported extra-virgin olive oils bought off the shelves of California supermarkets failed to meet international standards. Big brands like Bertolli, Filippo Berio and Carapelli were included in the study.

Those three sentences boil down to 15, 22, and 13 words long. We recommend that you keep most sentences in business documents under 25 words.

When your sentences feel convoluted, try cutting them down to size with more periods, stricter word counts, and just a few ideas each.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on sentence mechanics 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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Colons are slightly advanced punctuation marks, so it’s important to use them carefully.

Some writers still capitalize a word after a colon, as in this sentence:

Mary Ann thinks the presentation is flawed: She finds it too long and unfocused.

The capital letter in “She” is a bit old fashioned; we recommend lowercasing all words after colons except for proper nouns.

However, the traditional uppercase letter points to an important fact about colons. Like periods, colons should only follow groups of words that could stand alone as correct, complete sentences. (“Mary Ann thinks the presentation is flawed. She finds it too long and unfocused.”)

Even though it’s simpler to lowercase the word “she” after the original colon above, the old-fashioned capital letter can remind you not to use a colon incorrectly in sentences such as this one:

Mary Ann thinks that: the presentation is too long, lacks focus, and should be completely revised.

Adding a colon makes that sentence incorrect. You can add sophistication to your writing when you’re careful never to type a colon after a fragmentary idea.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on sentence mechanics and two more on punctuation. You’ll learn how to write for maximum 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.

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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.

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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.

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Very few business writers know the basic guidelines for when you do and don’t type a hyphen. Your writing can create an especially careful and polished impression when you grasp these three guidelines:

1. Don’t add a hyphen after most prefixes.
2. Don’t type a hyphen after a word that ends with -ly.
3. Do add a hyphen when most two-word descriptions come before a noun.

First, leave out a hyphen after a prefix in most words – e.g., preapproved or unplanned. But feel free to add a hyphen when the same letter is repeated – e.g., pre-existing or un-newsworthy.

Webster’s dictionary only includes hyphens after prefixes when a word would be unclear without it. (E.g., co-op is a two-syllable noun for a kind of apartment, while coop is a one-syllable noun for a chicken cage).

Second, never add hyphens after words that end with -ly (e.g., it’s incorrect to type the hyphen in “clearly-written report”).

And for other words, do add a hyphen to a two-word description that comes before a noun (“It’s a well-written report“) but leave out the hyphen when the same description follows the noun (“The report is well written”).

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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!

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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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