GrammarPhile Blog

Credit for the original, and extremely popular, blog post, North, East, South or West - Capitalize or Not?, goes to ProofreadNOW.com President Phil Jamieson.

The other day, I got lost in the jungle, but luckily, I had a compass with me …

So I was able to draw perfect circles with a pencil.¹

Do you feel this way? You have the raw materials (a knowledge of compass directions, the ability to point toward the sun and grunt “east”) but you don’t know “where to go” with them.

If you cringe every time you write a compass direction or a related term, you’ve found the perfect resource.

While there are some distinctions between style guides,² this post serves as an overview of the most important, well-accepted, and concise d

irections on the subject as it applies to business writing.

A list of the top five things that tick people off includes toilet paper hung backwards (whichever way that is), the sound of people chewing loudly, and the misuse of who and whom.

On this day in 1962, the Four Seasons earned their first No. 1 hit with “Sherry.” Frankie Valli had been hard at work trying to become a star for the better part of a decade before the Four Seasons achieved their breakthrough. They had come together as a group in several stages over the previous four years, changing their name in 1961 from the Four Lovers after failing an audition at a New Jersey bowling alley called The Four Seasons. It was keyboard player Bob Gaudio who wrote the song that would launch the group’s career.

When I was 8 years old, I thought all the songs on the radio were being performed live. Whitney Houston sure did sing a lot. I assumed the drummers from my older brother’s favorite “alternative rock” bands probably had to brace their arms in slings during commercial breaks, for all the playing they did. That was how musical artists earned the big money — performing several dozen times a day. It had to be exhausting being in the Top 20.

I don’t remember the moment I realized the songs were all recordings, but I do know that knowledge felt like a bit of a letdown. Just because it made more sense didn’t mean I was eager to adjust my perspective.

There’s a lesson in that. People are generally averse to change even if it’s for the sake of a broadened understanding and a more well-rounded view. We sometimes cling to the past, a perspective, and even the nonsensical simply because it’s our normal. And normal is comfortable. But there’s a way to marry the dependable with developments, specifically when it comes to writing.

You may remember our advice on style guide updates. To summarize: Toss out the old and swaddle the new. It’s whatany reputable style guide does, including AP, which is used by nearly a gazillion people worldwide. (A “gazillion” is hyperbole, a beefed-up form of exaggeration, and frowned upon by AP because it consists of statements that cannot be supported by facts. This clarification adheres to the most recent AP guidance on misinformation.)

If you’re one of those gazillion, check out this brief list of recent updates straight from the AP horse’s mouth*:

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.