Write It Well

It’s easy to learn when and how to type a dash instead of a hyphen.

Hyphens (-) connect words, while dashes (—) connect larger parts of a sentence. This paragraph illustrates the difference:

Twitter, the minimalist-format social network that claims to have 100 million users, has built its reputation around its simplicity. Members can post to the service only in text messages of 140 characters or less. They can include a link to another site, or to a photo or video. They can repost other users’ messages on their own pages. They can send each other equally spartan private messages. That’s about it — or so it seems.

A hyphen is used most often in two-word phrases that come before a noun (such as the phrase “two-word” before the noun “phrases” in this sentence).

A dash dramatically separates one idea from the rest of a sentence, calling attention to the words that follow it. Before “or so it seems” in the quote above, a journalist uses a dash to emphasize that Twitter has more uses than the obvious ones he’s just listed.

In Microsoft Word on a Mac or a PC, you can use the hyphen key to type a dash:

• On a Mac, you can type a dash by holding down the Option key plus the hyphen key
• On a PC, you can type a dash by holding down the CTRL key plus the hyphen key

Add a space both before and after this kind of dash, and your prose can instantly look more polished.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two 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!

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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Here are two simple rules to keep track of commas in complex sentences:

1. Don’t use commas when removing words would change the meaning
2. Do use commas to set off word groups that only add extra details

Here’s a sentence with two correct commas and one incorrect comma:

Whole Foods began a weekly Twitter chat, for an hour every Thursday, to discuss topics such as holiday menu planning, with its followers.

The first two commas are correct because they surround a word group that does not change the sentence meaning. (Taking out those words would leave the intact idea, “Whole Foods began a weekly Twitter chat to discuss topics such as holiday menu planning.”)

The third comma is incorrect because the words “with its followers” are essential to tell the reader who was part of this Whole Foods Twitter discussion.

Since removing the words would leave the company discussing holiday menus with no one, here’s how the sentence should read:

Whole Foods began a weekly Twitter chat, for an hour every Thursday, to discuss topics such as holiday menu planning with its followers.

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Write It Well’s 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 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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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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In a memo this week, Standards Editor Phil Corbett of the New York Times asked the organization’s writers to avoid the word tweet in most news articles. (A tweet is a message on Twitter; see our blog post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more information.)

Corbett’s rationale is that at the Times,

we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” – as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter – is all three….

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords…. let’s look for deft, English alternatives [to "tweet"]: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update.

In this case, we disagree with the words “jargon” and “deft.” Whether a word is jargon can depend on audience knowledge. We do advise against using recently coined words like tweet without a definition if your readers are unlikely to know them. But it doesn’t take much space to explain that “A tweet is a Twitter post” or that “Tweeting means writing on Twitter.”

The noun tweet is one short word. In comparison, “Twitter message” and “Twitter update” are unnecessarily long, formal, and clumsy phrases. We find it more deft and concise to define the word tweet and then use it freely.

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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.

Retweeting is when a Twitter user clicks a link to add someone else’s tweet to their own Twitter stream. (A tweet is a post on Twitter; see our blog post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more information.)

Retweeting is a way of telling your own Twitter followers, “This tweet is worthwhile.” The “RT” letters at the start of the following Twitter post are a signal that Mary Cullen (M_Cullen) retweeted  (RTed) the following post by Jason Fried (jasonfried):

RT @jasonfried: Jargon is insecurity.

At Write It Well, we’re big fans of plain English over jargon. Jargon in business writing can be a sign of insecurity, or a way to overinflate a simple message to make it look more substantial.

We also admire concise writing. If M_Cullen hadn’t RTed jasonfried’s tweet, we would have missed this pithy, well-phrased statement.

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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.

It’s usually best to avoid all-capital typing for e-mails, text messages, and tweets. It looks like you’re shouting. But check out these two tweets from the New Yorker, about an hour apart, with the time frames of  ”coming up” and then “NOW“:

Is college worth the price?:http://tny.com/cxoTFm; join the live chat at 12 ET, or ask a question now:http://tny.com/b2nZcR

Is college worth the price? Join our live chat RIGHT NOW:http://tny.com/b2nZcR

Twitter updates constantly. This uppercase “RIGHT NOW” is a case of genuine urgency: join in now, or lose out! If you followed the New Yorker‘s tweets, you’d see they’re carefully written and that this is almost the only uppercase typing they use for an entire page.

We’d say that if you regularly write clear, well-planned tweets, then some all-caps writing is fine. Just deploy it very strategically. If you save uppercase typing to highlight rare, urgent situations, then you won’t look like you’re crying (or tweeting) wolf!

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For a fun, unique case of all-capital tweeting, see FEMINIST HULK‘s page on Twitter.

Also see our post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more suggestions about maintaining a professional sound on the site. 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!

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!

Social media has captured everyone’s attention these days, especially businesses who want to capitalize on personal networking. In a recent article on The Morning News, Margaret Mason lists fourteen ways to use Twitter politely. She divides Twitter users into two types: those who broadcast, blog-style, and those who use the service to chat with each other. Some of her tips:

• Remember everyone can hear you. This goes not just for Twitter, but for Facebook and even e-mail.
• What’s rude in life is rude in Twitter. We feel a certain imaginary invulnerability when using the Internet. Being mean will come back to bite you.
• Think twice before Twittering in an altered state. Again, this goes for any type of communication that doesn’t require stamp-licking effort.

Whether you’re Twittering on a corporate account, starting a blog, or just shooting your co-worker an e-mail, take the time to polish your writing. Electronic communication is marvelously easy — which means broadcasting your mistakes is marvelously easy, too.

Smashing Magazine recently published a list of ten truths most corporate websites don’t want to face. I found Harsh Truth Number Five most interesting: “You are wasting your money on social networking.”

Not that social networking isn’t effective for corporations. As Paul Boag writes, “Tweeting on a corporate account or posting sales demonstrations on YouTube misses the essence of social networking. Social networking is about people engaging with people. Individuals do not want to build relationships with brands and corporations.”

How can a business use social networking tools effectively? Boag encourages companies to let their employees blog or tweet independently. With a few guidelines on acceptable content, employees can give their companies a personal, networked presence on the Internet.