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Grammar Mistakes Worse Than [Bleep]

Grammar and spelling mistakes in a job application are worse than being late or swearing during an interview, writes hip grammar maven Martha Brockenbrough in her book, Things That Make Us [Sic]. Founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG), Martha takes aim at jargon, pretentious babble, and confused pop stars alike. In a recent Grammar Girl podcast, Martha writes that good grammar is important not just for job applications, but for finding love and staying out of jail, too

Proofreading Well: The Error Hunt Simplified

At Write It Well, we often hear this from our training clients: “I read over my work, but I just don’t see my proofreading errors! What am I doing wrong?” Well, let’s start with what they’re doing right. Making the effort to present error-free documents is the first step. As research shows, written communications that are full of typos, misspellings and usage errors leave readers with a poor impression of the writer and the organization

Words to Avoid in 2009

A heavy dose of recession makes clients and customers more cynical than usual. MSNBC has a list of ten advertising words to avoid in 2009, including “free,” “guarantee,” and “synergy.” According to the article, consumers don’t have time for anything more than “straightforward, honest advertising messages

Hyperwriting: How To Write with Links

From e-mail to blog posts to website content, much of our business writing these days is “clickable.” There are several ways to put links in your text. Which linking style looks most professional? I’m not going to focus on the technical part of making links — which is usually as simple as clicking a menu button

Ahoy to Whom It May Concern

How to start? Liz Danzico, the information architect and blogger at Bobulate, thinks that e-mail salutations have three basic purposes. In “Anatomy of a Salutation,”  she writes that salutations not only function as greetings, but set tone and establish a hierarchy between writers. More interesting, she notes that e-mail salutations evolve fairly quickly during back-and-forth correspondence
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