Write It Well

Good grammar rules make our jobs easier: they help us communicate clearly and professionally. But there are many mistaken grammar notions that do nothing but get in the way and make us feel insecure about our writing. Philip Corbett, the deputy news editor at The New York Times, points out some of these grammar hobgoblins this week in After Deadline. Here are two:

• None: singular AND plural. Under the mistaken impression that none was a contraction for “not one,” many grammar advocates insist we use none with singular verbs. Actually, none has been both singular and plural since its birth as the word nan in Old English. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage notes that King Alfred the Great used it as a plural back in A.D. 888.
• Beginning with but or and. Conjunctions like but or and give us a short way to say “however” or “in addition” when opening a sentence. However and in addition often sound awkward and overly formal. And none of the major style guides have a problem with conjunctions starting a sentence.

With unemployment rising, job hunts have become even more competitive. The president of Greener World Media put it this way: 

“The ability to write clearly is important. My business, Greener World Media, helps businesses succeed by being green. We write letters, reports, presentations, e-mails, and more, so I need people who can write clearly and without errors. We’re growing and I recently filled a few new positions. I can’t tell you how many cover letters and resumes I discarded because the applicant didn’t take the time to think about their reader, organize their thoughts, use correct grammar and punctuation, or proofread!”

If you’re on the job market, now is the time to hone your writing skills. Write It Well has a selection of books and workshops to help you improve your professional writing, from cover letters to performance reviews.

From e-mail to blog posts to website content, much of our business writing these days is “clickable.” There are several ways to put links in your text. Which linking style looks most professional? I’m not going to focus on the technical part of making links — which is usually as simple as clicking a menu button. Instead, I’m going to talk about the phrasing.

One of the ugliest ways to include a link is this: CLICK HERE!! By all means, avoid the words “click here,” and particularly avoid capital letters. Readers know how to follow a link. Saying “click here” (1) wastes words, (2) doesn’t tell the reader anything about the linked site, and (3) smacks of spam advertising.

The more contemporary understated version of “CLICK HERE” is to incorporate direction words into the flow of your text. For example: You can find a linguistics blog here, and food writers here, here, and here. While much better than “click here,” direction-word links are a little bit coy: they force the reader to click on them before knowing exactly where they lead. In informal contexts, they’re acceptable, but don’t rely on “here” when writing something really impressive.

The best way to format links is to incorporate them unobtrusively in the sentence. For your link text, choose a word or phrase that refers specifically to the topic of the linked page. For example, link a company name to its website, link a confusing word to its Wikipedia page, and link to any reference when you mention it. Should you link the whole phrase? Or just the main word? That’s up to you. Just be consistent.

One more thing: avoid putting two different links next to each other. A reader won’t necessarily know that each word goes to a separate page!

Efficient research is critical to solid writing. The blog Dumb Little Man has a useful post on using Google more efficiently. Even when you aren’t writing a “research” essay, do a quick survey of the Internet just to see what other people have written on your topic. Heaven forbid, you might even find out you were wrong.

Here are a few of their tips:

• Use the “not” operator (“-”) to weed out irrelevant returns. Suppose you wanted to do an image search for white stripes, but didn’t want pictures of Jack White. An search for “white stripes -music -jack -meg -band” will get you at least a few pictures unrelated to the band.
• Use the “define:” operator to define terms quickly. Whether you don’t know the word at all, or just want to check your hunch, Google puts the definition right at your fingertips.
• Use the “site:” operator to search within a site. Many sites have their own search bars, but they can be slow or inconsistent.