Even professional writers – from Margaret Atwood to Kurt Vonnegut – benefit from the expert guidance of an editor. The same holds true for anyone who puts pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – and represents either himself or his organization to the world.
But what if you don’t have an editor handy? Or the budget to subject every memo and email to scrutiny?
Try these three tips, and see how your writing improves:
Most people believe that English grammar is simply English grammar. There is a right way and a wrong way to construct a sentence, a right place and a wrong place to put a comma, words that go together and words that don’t. For the most part, this is true. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of tiny rules that native speakers instinctively know and follow when communicating. What most people don’t realize is how mutable some of these rules are, and how others are not, and where the differences lie.
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If you want to communicate your written message clearly, then you owe it to yourself, and your audience, to be purposeful about punctuation. Take the comma. Used correctly, it can help your readers navigate their way through some of your most sophisticated prose. Used effectively, it can add a subtle pause to accentuate your point.
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Back in the day, Ms. Nancy Duty taught me—and the rest of Bruceville-Eddy High school—to use two spaces at the end of every sentence and after colons. Most of us were learning to type on IBM Selectrics, although a few were using the newfangled electronic typewriters. (The previous year, my eighth-grade class had started to learn typing on Macs, but the school still had a limited number of computers.)
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Howard Levy, principal of Red Rooster Group, asks the following questions about proper style for percentages and time:
When you have a range of numbers referred to in a sentence, do you use an en dash or the word “to”? As in “20 to 40%” or “20 – 40%”?
Also, would you use the % sign after both the 20 and the 40?
What about time ranges? Do you need to use the :00 in all cases, even if some times start at :30, as in 6 – 7:30 pm vs. 6:00 – 7:30?
All excellent questions. As is typical when dealing with English grammar rules and style guidelines, the answers depend on the circumstances.
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In this post, I’ll take a closer look at SEO and the process of optimizing websites for better placement within organic search results to improve website traffic.
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