Have you ever noticed that many professional letters you receive at your home or business are absent one very important piece of information—the date? If I had a gold dollar for every piece of correspondence that was prepared without a date at the top to indicate when the news was issued, I could afford to miss every deadline imposed by their limited-time offers:
Everyone remembers that childhood game, right? The one where you couldn’t take a step forward unless you asked the game leader, “Mother, May I?” Funny how we were grammatical as children, but we lost that ability as we aged.
Topics: misused words, word usage, grammar
We recently received the following question from one of our readers:
Topics: errors, published documents
The following is a guest post from Maria Ranier.
Topics: proofread, proofreading, spelling, proofeading technique, spell-check software, homonyms
Making sales today is tough business. Finding jobs is even tougher. And though everybody is allowed a mistake here and there, the gatekeepers to both sales and jobs are clamping down on proposals and resumes, and even speech patterns. They're saying to themselves more and more, "Make the first pass easier by simply eliminating the ones with mistakes." So you want to avoid mistakes! Here are some more tips on making the right choice in words:
Topics: errors, misused words, proposals
While phobias can be serious challenges for affected people and their psychiatrists, most of us toss the extension onto almost any word and run with it. Schoolophobia is what you have at the end of vacation. Dogophobia is what you have if you've been bitten by a dog. Is phobophobia what you have when you fear being labeled as fearful? Here are some real phobias. Can you identify the meanings?
I received the following from one of our editors, Marie Stewart. Neither Marie nor I could find information about the author of this piece although we found it quite a few times on the Internet without any attribution.
Topics: misused words, two letter word
Well, the words aren't confused, but sometimes people who use them are. Our job today is to help you avoid confusing the following words, some of which we've seen even in documents processed by our editors THIS VERY DAY!
Topics: misused words
Whether writing web copy, an annual report, a proposal, email, or a marketing brochure, all of us want our written business communications to be clear and concise. Most important, we want them to be read! Ambiguity that causes confusion or missed errors can detract from our company's credibility and distract readers from getting the message we're delivering. If we make mistakes, many readers will simply put our message aside and go on to their next task. Today, we'd like to offer three simple tips to improve your written business communications:
Topics: business writing, punctuation, spell check
We receive lots of grammar and punctuation questions from customers and visitors to our site. This week, I thought I'd post a question we received about quotations along with Phil Jamieson's answer. In coming weeks, I'll post some of the other questions we've received along with their answers.
Topics: quotations, business writing, punctuation, grammar
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