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Our Singapore Office Is Now Open!

Our office in Singapore is now open! For clients in all industries, Write It Well provides a broad range of services: Technical writing services Editing services Many forms of customized training: webinars workshops e-learning coaching Please contact us for more information!

Dashes, Parentheses, and Your Readers’ Attention

When you use punctuation skillfully, you can influence your readers to either skim over an idea or to pay more attention to it. Take a look at this sentence: Just one team among baseball’s lowest payrolls—the Diamondbacks—is likely to make the playoffs. Now compare it with this revised sentence: Just one team among baseball’s lowest payrolls (the Diamondbacks) is likely to make the playoffs

Biz India Reviews Professional Writing Skills!

Biz India editor Ramu Nakliba writes that “we cannot overestimate the value” business writers can receive from Write It Well’s book Professional Writing Skills. Nakliba praises the book’s clear organization and its targeted exercises that help businesspeople practice the writing they actually do at their jobs from day to day. Professional Writing Skills is a terrific tool to help individuals or groups become better writers

Verbs and Hassle-Free Sentences

How often do you type a sentence, find it unclear, and then get a headache untangling your ideas? One effective detangling method is to identify your verbs and plant them right after their subjects. Take a look at this sentence and ask yourself how it could be clearer: Another problem for e-books that are not simultaneously published in print is that they pose a marketing challenge. There are three subject-verb pairs in that sentence: “problem … is,” “e-books … are,” and “e-books [they] pose

Short Sentences, Simple Punctuation, and Fine Foods

Short sentences tend to be easier for writers to punctuate correctly and easier for busy readers to follow. Here’s a sentence that’s correctly punctuated but could still slow readers down because it’s 46 words long: Last year, the Olive Center released a surprising study, based on laboratory and sensory testing, that found that 69 percent of imported extra-virgin olive oils — including big brands like Bertolli, Filippo Berio and Carapelli — bought off the shelves of California supermarkets failed to meet international standards. You don’t need to keep a careful eye on wandering verb phrases and nonessential clauses when you limit each sentence to two or three ideas: Last year, the Olive Center released a surprising study based on laboratory and sensory testing
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