All writers make mistakes. Some writers aren’t the best with punctuation, while others struggle with pronouns and hyphens. Know the mistakes you are more inclined to make so that you can fix them before submitting or publishing your work. Below are some common mistakes writers make, and how you can avoid them.
Topics: common mistakes, writing mistakes
Businesses spend millions of dollars on advertising, day-to-day operations, research and development, personnel, and acquisitions. But they seldom focus on how they will develop and manage a successful writing culture. Yet building and maintaining a successful writing culture for a business is essential to all its operations. It establishes effective and clear communication, and fosters a collaborative and positive environment.
Topics: business writing, effective writing
Cognitive science research shows that reading fiction makes you a more well-rounded person and will improve your quality of life both personally and professionally.
Topics: business writing, effective writing, writing skills
"Casual Fridays" and Ping Pong™ tables in the break room aren't the only relaxed things about businesses these days. Businesses have also become a lot more relaxed in their writing, and formal lines seem to be more blurred now.
Below are some examples of how formal lines in business writing have become more blurred, with pros and cons for each.
Topics: formal writing, informal writing, casual writing
A Very Brief History of Punctuation
Did you know that some early Greek and Latin texts lacked any punctuation whatsoever? There often weren't even distinct line breaks or paragraphs either. It was up to the reader or orator to figure it out. Can you imagine reading dense philosophy or a mathematics lesson without the information being separated into paragraphs with sentences? Yikes!
Topics: punctuation, periods, em dash, question mark, exclamation point
Professionals outside and inside the legal field complain about long and confusing documents. Everyone is occasionally guilty of looking at a lease agreement or a business contract with a bewildered expression while uttering the phrase, "Huh?"
If you believe that the practice of writing legal documents as if they are boring court dockets from the 18th century must end, you are not alone. Even the US government agrees that we should write documents in plain English. The Plain Writing Act passed in 2010 requires federal agencies to write "clear Government communication that the public can understand and use." And it states that documents distributed to the public should be clear, concise, and well-organized.
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