Write It Well

Numbers and apostrophes confuse many business writers. Here’s a sentence that correctly omits an apostrophe:

The study, led by Northwestern University researchers, followed a large group of men in their 20s.

It’s incorrect to add an apostrophe + -s to make a number plural (e.g., “in their 20’s”).

However, you do add an apostrophe before the number when you name a decade but leave out the century:

Our company was founded back in the ’20s.

In this case, the apostrophe takes the place of the missing numbers you’d type in “the 1920s.”

Remember that decades with apostrophes are just like the contractions can’t for cannot or isn’t for is not.

The apostrophe in “founded in the ’20s” stands for missing numbers, just as apostrophes in contractions stand for missing letters.

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to double-check your spelling 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 lessons on punctuation marks, including the apostrophe.

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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Complete trust in your spell-checker can land you in trouble. Here’s a New York Times article with two words that should be a single word:

A comprehensive survey released last month … revealed that while the publishing industry had expanded over all, publishers’ mass-market paperback sales had fallen 14 percent since 2008.

An overall success is far more modest than triumphing over all competitors. Spell-checkers can’t recognize this kind of context in your sentences. That’s why it’s important to carefully proofread your documents, testing them word by word.

Spell-checkers save time, but they require patience. Clicking Ignore All once too often in a Word file can mean that repeated misspellings remain in your published document.

Misspellings can distract your readers and diminish your credibility. But careful spell-checking and proofreading can help you keep your readers’ attention and their respect.

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to double-check your spelling 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 a chapter on commonly misspelled and misused words, including twelve proofreading tips.

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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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.

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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.

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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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It’s dangerous to rely on a computer to catch all your spelling mistakes. Check out this typo in a recent newspaper headline:

Photo by Flickr user ConanTheLibrarian

Of course, “sirs” should be “stirs.” Gentlemen is also the usual plural of sir, but the spelling “sirs” slips through most spell-checkers.

When any business overlooks important typos, its official voice instantly looks less reliable. It always pays off to invest time in careful writing and careful review of any document before you send it out.

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For guidelines on correct grammar and punctuation in business writing, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

And consider using Write It Well’s proofreading and editing services for your own or your employees’ writing. Just click the more info/contact us button on our homepage to send us a sample document, noting any concerns or goals you have for it.

We’ll copyedit a sample portion for free, and return it within two days. You’ll get estimates of the cost and time frame for our sending you back a full, edited document that will make a great impression.

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All this month’s blog posts will be about maintaining a professional image on Twitter. First up is a tweet from the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Twitter account:

Win 8 $100 gift certificates to participating Dine About Town restaurants. Details and contest entry at: http://sfg.ly/doQSZj

At 125 characters (with spaces), this tweet is short and sweet. It’s 15 characters under Twitter’s maximum 140-character limit. With this extra space to burn, we’d suggest two changes.

First, no colon is necessary after “at,” since you’d write “it’s at this webpage” instead of ”it’s at: this webpage.” Also, it might be clearer to spell out the number 8. Winning “eight $100″ certificates would be more immediately clear than “8 $100″ ones.

When you have the space, standard punctuation and full spellings make most tweets clearer.

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See our post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more suggestions about maintaining a professional sound on Twitter. And later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post!

Lists are a great way to organize information – especially for a business document. “10 Simple Google Search Tricks” by Simon Mackie (New York Times, April 2, 2010) is a good illustration of how lists get stronger and weaker through parallel grammar. Here are some of the headings in his list:

“1. Use the ‘site:’ operator to limit searches to a particular site.

“2. Use Google as a spelling aid.

“4. Find out what time it is anywhere in the world.

“8. Search for specific document types.

“10. Area code lookup.”

Number 10 sticks out, doesn’t it? Unlike the other list items, it’s not a complete sentence, and it doesn’t have its own verb.

The other items are parallel, complete sentences starting with “Use,” “Find,” “Get,” “Exclude,” and “Search.” After this clear-cut series of verb-driven sentences, “Area code lookup” looks distractingly different.

When you include a bulleted or numbered list in your own documents, consider starting every single item with a verb – say, either all present-tense verbs, or all -ing verbs. Your list will be dynamic, and your reader will stay laser-focused on the series of actions you have in mind.

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For more guidelines on how to use parallel structure in your lists, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide. Also check out our book Essential Grammar: A Write It Well Guide, which will ship later this summer!

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Many pairs of English words sound alike, although the two words have different spellings and very different meanings. In these cases it can be hard to choose the right word, since a word can have the wrong meaning for your sentence but still be spelled correctly. Misused words can distract your readers and diminish your credibility.

Whenever you’re in doubt about a spelling, use one of these methods to select the right word:

• Rewrite the sentence, using a word that’s easier to spell and recognize
• Memorize the differences between similar-sounding words

Memorizing spelling differences requires some dedication on your part. For a simpler approach, try stepping back and rewriting the sentence below with a common word that’s easier to spell.

Nick met with his supervisor for (advice, or advise?) about handling troublesome customers.

The right word is advice: this noun is spelled with a c, while the verb advise is spelled with an s. But if you forgot the spellings and didn’t have a dictionary, you could also use an alternate word:suggestions.

Nick met with his supervisor for suggestions about handling troublesome customers.

You can test your spelling knowledge by selecting the correct word in the word pairs in the following sentences, and also step back and try to think of an alternate, easily spelled word.

1. The delay will not (affect or effect?) the outcome.
2. The attorney (cited, sighted, or sited?) similar cases.
3. What is your (principal or principle?) reason for this decision?
4. Her (principals or principles?) prevented her from accepting the illegal funds.

Here are the answers, with alternate words you might also choose if you’re not certain of the correct spelling:

1.  The delay will not affect the outcome.
or The delay will not change the outcome.

2.  The attorney cited similar cases.
or The attorney referred to similar cases.
To remember: to cite is from the noun citation.

3.  What is your principal reason for this decision?
or What is your primary reason for this decision?

4.  Her principles prevented her from accepting the illegal funds.
or Her ethics prevented her from accepting the illegal funds.
To remember: principles are related to ethics. Principle ends with e, and ethics begins with e.

Check out our book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide for more advice on spelling, word choice, and many other tips for maintaining a consistent image of yourself as a careful, knowledgeable writer. The new edition of the book and its corresponding facilitator kit will ship in February 2010.

“Why do some chocolates cost so much more than others?

“Although chocolate is an ‘affordable luxury’ in a general sense, some brands demand a king’s ransom.

“Much like coffee beans, cocoa beans are sold by commodity markets. The global price of chocolate spiked in the 1970s, after which it declined a little, only to recover somewhat in the early ‘90s. Prices have never reached the highs of the 1970s, but they have remained pretty constant since the 1990s.”

– Mary Goodbody, “Four Chocolate Questions Answered,”
The Daily Beast, September 29, 2009

Have you ever wondered how to use apostrophes to type dates? Forget about the apostrophe s. Mary Goodbody shows you how.

The Chicago Manual of Style uses an apostrophe when a date is spelled with two numerals, as in “the early ‘90s” or “the class of ‘99.” It’s exactly like the apostrophe for the omitted letter o in isn‘t. The apostrophe in those two dates stands for the omitted 19 in “the early 1990s” or “the class of 1999.”

Finally, it’s also correct Chicago style to spell out a decade as a word with no apostrophe at all: “the nineties.”

For more tips on how to use apostrophes correctly, see Write It Well’s book Professional Writing Skills: A Self-Paced Training Program.

“[A] seven-person team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers …. was the longtime frontrunner in the contest…. The Netflix contest has been widely followed because its lessons could extend well beyond improving movie picks.”  – Steve Lohr, “Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest,” New York Times, September 21, 2009

Finally…!  Someone who knows how to use a hyphen!  Lohr hyphenates “seven-person ” and “machine-learning” because these two-word phrases come before the nouns they describe – “team” and “experts.” There’d be no hyphen if either two-word phrase came after the noun: “They were experts in machine learning.” 

For more tips on how to use hyphens correctly, see Write It Well’s book Professional Writing Skills: A Self-Paced Training Program.