Nov 21, 2019 | Editing, Effective Writing, Punctuation and Grammar
Conjunctions, such as and, but, or, and so, can make a difference in the meaning of your sentence. Be sure to choose the right one. Conjunctions are connecting words that express a relationship between two elements (words, clauses, or phrases). You tend to pay little...
Oct 29, 2019 | Communication, Effective Writing, Punctuation and Grammar
Language traditionalists bristle when people use nouns as verbs and vice versa, but such conversions have a long history in English. Just be careful about using new forms that readers might interpret as sloppiness. Many people are convinced that words are one part of...
Oct 24, 2019 | Communication, Editing, Effective Writing, Punctuation and Grammar
Helping verbs (is, are, was, were, will be, etc.) often are necessary to express a point in time (verb tense), but you can strengthen your sentence by stripping them when they are unnecessary. Write with strong verbs, a valuable piece of wisdom for centuries,...
Oct 20, 2019 | Editing, Effective Writing, Punctuation and Grammar
To make your writing a little tighter and more snappy, become friends with the semicolon. The semicolon is a misunderstood punctuation mark. Some people have a strange notion that a semicolon is for academic writing or that it is used by people trying to look...
Sep 23, 2019 | Editing, Effective Writing, Punctuation and Grammar
Where to use commas and semicolons can be challenging in many sentences, but how to punctuate around because and however can cause considerable head scratching. A comma before “because” Punctuation marks are not little black marks that we randomly sprinkle...
Sep 4, 2019 | Communication, Editing, Effective Writing, Punctuation and Grammar
Excessive capitalization is widespread in business, particularly in job titles. Know when it’s appropriate to capitalize. People frequently uppercase a word because they saw it capitalized elsewhere, because it “looks right,” or because they just...