GrammarPhile Blog

An in-house style guide can take your life from VCR to VCR+. Despite its imposing name, creating and implementing an in-house style guide is a simple process.

First, go inside your house. A dog or chicken house will also work in a pinch. Next, put on the most fashionable thing you own. Even better: Put on many of the most fashionable things you own. Then, walk back outside and sashay down the sidewalk (bonus points if you drag a leash without an animal attached). Finally, record your neighbors’ reactions in real time and post them on social media for posterity.

Done.

If you prefer more specific and factual instructions, here are six quick tips on how to nail down a comprehensive and practical in-house style guide.

The public has spoken, and native Canadian Maureen McLeod is our winner!

(We became aware that the formerly published tagline, though not intended for use in any capacity beside this contest, is coincidentally in use in a very similar form by another company. Out of respect, we’ve preemptively removed the winning tagline from this blog post.)

Maureen writes limericks for fun. Her friends tell her she could be a Jeopardy star, but she slams the competition from the comfort of her home. When her children were four and eleven years old, she and her husband sold their house and vehicles, packed their belongings into a second-hand camper, and traveled around the United States for 10 months. Just for fun. “He was adventurous,” she says.

In short, Maureen is “good people.”

It should come as no surprise then, that she won our Tagline Contest. Her liveliness is paired fairly with a delightful sense of humor. More specifically to the point, she has been wielding the English language with aplomb and precision for decades.

She grew up in a small community in Northern Alberta. “A tiny, hamlet town,” she says. Her father was the school principal, and despite the fact that there was no library, he always found ways to get them books. Those stories opened up her world and set her on a path to her love of knowledge and the English language.

We are blown away by the number of our readers who submitted their entries for our completely bogus Tagline Contest. We received many, many submissions and our staff had a difficult time selecting the top five. In fact, because there were three taglines that tied for fifth, you'll have seven taglines to choose from to pick our winner.

Remember what’s up for grabs: A $50 Amazon gift card, infinite bragging rights, and 14.82 minutes of fame (including the option to be featured in follow-up blog/LinkedIn posts).

Vote for your favorite tagline by ranking the taglines below. We will notify the winner by email and announce the winner publicly on August 12, 2021.

Get those votes in!  The deadline for voting is 5:00 pm ET on August 5, 2021. 

Fancy yourself a genius creative? Love grammar? Want to make the world a better place? Angling for a short-lived Amazon shopping spree? Then you’re just who we’ve been looking for.

First, the completely made-up premise:

We made the mistake of hiring our cousin’s boyfriend’s dog’s best friend and self-proclaimed “copywriting and marketing guru” to come up with a list of possible new taglines for ProofreadNOW.com. We lost confidence in him based on his subsequent two-word e-mail responses consisting of “Huh?” and “K.”

He finally submitted a snarky note three weeks after our deadline asserting that he was confident whatever he lacked in actual experience he’d made up for with excessiveness, along with the following long and atrocious list.

Good business is the perpetual pursuit of consistency. Consistent quality, service, transparency, work culture, branding, and…grammar.

If you’ve worked in the corporate world for longer than three seconds (or with more than one other person for more than 17.358 days), you know consistency can seem like an unachievable dream, akin to walking on the moon in the year 1523.

Enter the venerable style guide. While it can’t make up for everything an erratic work culture lacks or propel you to the moon, we guarantee using one will preserve your sanity and make your life significantly better.*

ProofreadNOW.com uses a variety of style guides to standardize our approach to your business documents. In this way, the rules that guide our proofreading are clear and dependable, for all types of submissions. Your expectations and our process are both defined and harmonious. Win-win.

There are three fundamental aspects to our style guide usage:

1. The Norm: Our baseline is the Chicago Manual of Style, 17^th Edition. For every document submitted to us without an in-house style guide, we’ll apply this manual, by default. This practice ensures there are no distractions like wonky punctuation or a smattering of compound words without hyphens that will make readers grow extra eyebrow hair in consternation. So if clients specifically abhor this manual, either for its grammatical prescriptions or an aversion to its namesake city (probably because of the wind, which makes it difficult to read and write), a heads up is appreciated.

Telling people that they’re wrong is one of the most exquisite joys life has to offer. The fly in this highbrow soup is determining how to do so without causing offense to your more grammar-bereft counterparts.

Looking for an easy, incredible return on investment for your business writing? You don’t need exhaustive grammar lessons or online courses to up your game and capture your audience. You need 5 minutes. We’ve gathered our top writing tips, based on the errors we most commonly correct for our clients.

First, check out Part 1, here.

• Homographs and Easily Confused Words

Words that are spelled differently, sound similar/identical, and have different meanings are called homographs. We often see one used in place of another.

Examples include accept and except, insure and ensure, compliment and complement, piece and peace, principal and principle.

However, there are other words with such similar spellings that they’re easily confused, like contact and contract, form and from, casual and causal.

Speedy typing is usually the culprit. Keep an eye out for homographs that trip you up or commonly used words in your industry that, with a letter or two switched, take on a whole new meaning.

• Which vs. That

Use “that” when what follows is necessary to understand the sentence/context. Use “which” when what follows could be removed without affecting the meaning of the sentence.

For example: The file that I need is saved on the cloud. The white paper, which I wrote in a hammock on the beach in about 25 minutes, failed to impress my boss.

See how you could take the parenthetical out of the second sentence and still have the same meaning (with fewer details)?

Need it: that. Could do without: which.

Note: This explanation applies to North American English; in the U.K., there is greater flexibility in these usages.

You need fast. You need easy. With your busy schedule, slowing down to learn the ins and outs of grammar minutiae isn’t just unappealing, it’s inconceivable. The five minutes it will take you to read this will save you exponentially more time in the future. These quick and simple grammar tips for business writing are based on some of the most common errors we correct:

• Subject-Verb Agreement

For the most part, this is obvious. You don’t write: I are the CEO. The return on investment am bad.

But there’s the less obvious: Nouns that are plural in form but singular in meaning usually take singular verbs. Nouns that name a group of people or things take singular verbs.

For example: News travels fast; bad news travels faster. Economics is a fascinating subject, said no one, ever. The company is supplying ergonomic chairs made entirely of pillows. A flock of seagulls does all of our accounting.

• Capitalization in Heads

If you’re unsure when/what to capitalize in titles and headings, here’s a summary. Capitalize everything but:

• • Articles (a, an, the)
  • Conjunctions (connecting words like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so)
  • Prepositions (words that often show direction, time, and location, such as of, with, to, on, before, into, over, about).

If an article, conjunction, or preposition begins or ends a title, capitalize it.

Some style guides, like AP, call for capitalizing conjunctions and prepositions of four or more letters, phrasal verbs (e.g., Turn Off, Look For) and verbs in an infinitive (e.g., To Be, To Analyze).

If you hadn’t realized, the basis of this blog post is inconsistency in that we originally declared consistency a virtue and necessary component of excellent writing, and subsequently retracted that statement in the title, forward. Yes, we take it back…without remorse.

In earnest, we seek to gently qualify our original statement. Consistency is only helpful in certain contexts. It’s easy to rely on what’s natural while writing, but what’s natural is really another word for “bad habits.” Take, for example, this paragraph:

I ate my peanut butter sandwich slowly. I wiped my mouth with my napkin, paying extra attention to my upper cheeks. I always got peanut butter all over my face. I never knew why. I guessed it was because I had a tiny mouth and ate big sandwiches. I laughed at how much peanut butter was stuck to my cheeks.

See the issue? No, not the outrageous table manners or the rather silly topic. Every sentence begins with “I.” I mentally shouted that sentence as I wrote it. I can’t stand reading an entire paragraph of sentences that begin with the same word. I don’t care whether the first word is one of my favorites (“guffaw”) or most hated (“phlegm”) — it’s always terrible.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t admire the heck out of Mr. Gardner’s panache, provided he wasn’t completely delusional. Few of us have that sort of confidence in our writing, dancing, or ability to cook eggs over easy.

If you, unlike Mr. Gardner, stink at writing and you’re painfully aware of that fact, tighten your suspenders. I’m going to change your life with one word:

Consistency.

If you toppled backward out of your chair in surprise and disbelief, please collect yourself. Consistency will upgrade your writing like nothing else.

Here are eleven of virtually innumerable examples of how consistency makes a huge, positive difference: