Bulleted Lists Keep Your Ideas in Motion

Bulleted lists can help readers follow your ideas as easily as they’d step down a staircase. Here are two illustrations, starting with an intricate sentence about an array of covers you can buy to protect an iPad 2: There is the shockproof CoverBuddy from SwitchEasy.com, available in 10 colors (plus ultraclear) for $25; the Snap Shield cover from Belkin

The Colon: A Mark of Leadership?

You convey leadership through your writing when you master nuances of punctuation. For example, this sentence features a strong, strategic colon: Though he is routinely armed with an iPhone and at least one iPad, the man who oversees the entire animated film output for both Pixar and Walt Disney Studios prefers doing things old school: warm-embrace greetings followed by face-to-face meetings. — Peter Newcomb, “A Day with John Lasseter, King of Pixar,” wsj

Typing Correctly and Trusting Your Ear

People sometimes make punctuation mistakes because they don’t type the way they speak. Here’s an example: [The view from the rear of the property] displays the canopy of a 150-year-old, live-oak forest. — “Killingsworth ‘Case Study’ home in Piedmont,” sfgate

Parentheses, Dashes, and Slapdash Punctuation

Your writing can look incoherent if you use too many different punctuation marks in a short space. In this example, it looks as if the author threw in parentheses and dashes at random: [Lonnie magazine] has attracted big-name advertisers (Kravet, Room & Board and Bloomingdale’s all ran ads in the latest issue), as well as competitors. Since Lonny started, in October 2009 — at a time when many traditional shelter magazines, including House & Garden, Metropolitan Home and Blueprint, had gone out of business — three more online shelter magazines have popped up

“That,” “Which,” and the Future of Your Wallet

The words that and which give readers crucial signals about information. Here’s an example: Google Wallet [is a mobile application; consumers use it by waving] their cellphones at a retailer’s terminal to make a payment instead of using a credit card…. The mobile wallet will work at any of the 124,000 merchants [who] accept MasterCard’s PayPass terminals, which take contactless payments, and more than 300,000 merchants outside the United States