Remember when all formal correspondence started with To Whom It May Concern? These days, if you receive an email with that as the opener, you’re more likely to send it straight to the trash. The days of proper letters have come to an end, but that doesn’t mean you should use loose, casual language and expect to get what you want. A formal email is not the same as an effective email, but combining the power of the two gives you a better chance of getting the reply you desire.
Topics: business writing, marketing writing, marketing email, email marketing
"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
Don’t believe what you’ve heard or seen. The hyphen is not dead. Its use has been declining, but mostly in the realm of joining common nouns. In 2007, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary eliminated hyphens from 16,000 entries. Bumble-bee became bumblebee, science books mention test tube instead of test-tube, and cry-baby joined to form one word.
The first recorded hyphen showed up in the work of Dionysius Thrax, the original grammarian. Back then, it was a tie-like (‿) sign used to join two words that one would otherwise have read separately. Then came letter-spacing in the Middle Ages, and the hyphen came to symbolize a connector between two words that had been incorrectly spliced by a space. We have Johannes Gutenberg to thank for the modern version of the hyphen. When setting his famous Bible, his tools wouldn’t let him include the hyphen below letters, so he moved it up to the middle of the line (Wikipedia).
Topics: hyphenation, hyphen
As a writer and a professional, you should always strive to be grammatically correct. However, there are times when it’s less important to follow strict grammar rules and more important to connect with your audience. Especially when you’re attempting to inform or persuade an audience about an idea or product.
You can’t truly connect with your audience if you aren’t speaking their language. And if you truly want to speak their language, you will be conversational yet professional in your copy. Sometimes this means you’ll have to break some of the rules, like the ones listed below.
Topics: grammar, grammar rules
If most people’s No. 1 fear is speaking in public, and dying is their second biggest fear, then their third biggest fear must be writing about themselves. Or maybe it just feels that way when the assignment of writing a bio comes up.
These days, it’s common to be asked for a blurb about your personal history for websites, apps, conference materials, etc. Ultimately, the point of a bio is to sell yourself in a more personal way than a résumé could, or should, accomplish. The following will help you craft the right message in your unique voice, to get readers to say, “I want to meet this person!”
Topics: writing tips, writing, writing bios
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
Tomorrow marks the official day when furry little Punxsutawney Phil supposedly forecasts the arrival of the spring season. But for some movie enthusiasts and Bill Murray fans, Groundhog Day refers to something entirely different. That something is a 1993 cult classic movie where Murray’s character finds himself repeating the same day over and over. To celebrate, we’ve pulled together a list of redundant phrases. Save yourself the repetition and drop these from your vocabulary.
Topics: redundancy, redundant phrases
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.
Still feeling exhausted from last week’s exhausting quiz featuring an exhaustive list of easily confused words? Then we’ll get right to the answers! But first, congratulations to Holly Hammond who was the first person to answer all questions correctly. Holly wins a $25 Amazon gift card.
This quiz stumped 91% of those who answered. 9% of respondents correctly answered all ten questions. Now onto the answers.
Topics: quiz answers, quiz
We’re not sure if this quiz will give you anxiety or angst, or both, or just one, or neither…? That’s the beauty of the English language – words that look alike, sound alike, and sort of mean the same thing, but not at all. This quiz features easily confused words that when swapped for each other can lead to confusion and embarrassment.
Topics: quiz, confusing words
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