You know when you can’t sleep – you toss and turn, count sheep, think positive thoughts, try meditating, go get a glass of warm milk. Nothing works. At 1 a.m. you look out the window to see if anyone else has their lights on, 2 a.m. you check your email and FB messenger, 3 a.m.…
A style sheet helps keep your writing consistent, whether that’s an article, a newsletter, web content, a brochure, or an annual report. While a style guide like the Chicago Manual of Style or the Canadian Press Stylebook will lay down the basic rules it won’t help you with things specific to your company or industry…
So you’ve been asked to speak at a conference or at your local business improvement meeting, or at your niece’s wedding.
Good writing isn’t written – it’s rewritten. And then it’s edited!
Apostrophes cause all sorts of confusion. They get thrown into places they don’t belong and left out where they most definitely do. There are three places where apostrophes seem to cause the most confusion — omissions and contractions, possessives and plurals. Omissions and contractions Apostrophes fill in the gap for a missing letter(s), or where…
The instructor of a writing course I took a few years ago introduced it by noting that 60 per cent of writing was thinking. Sometimes I forget this advice and start a project without thinking. I plunge into the writing, bang out a paragraph or two and come to a halt — lost. It’s as if I…
There are many words in the English language that sound alike but by changing one letter they take on a different meaning. That’s usually not a problem when you’re speaking, but it can really trip you up in written language — and spell check won’t help you. Here are 20 commonly misused/misspelled words.
When I was a kid growing up in New Zealand, I had two favourite words: antidisestablishmentarianism and Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu. Antidisestablishmentarianism means, in case you don’t know this, opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England. Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu is the name of a tiny hill in New Zealand. In English it means the place where Tamatea, the…
“The secret of good writing,” says William Zinsser* author of On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction, “is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.” This means getting rid of every word that serves no function but only weakens your sentence.