Professional Writing and Editing

Finally, I’ve found a concrete example showing why we should avoid the use of “shall” in writing. (yes, even legal writing)

While attending the PLAIN conference, I had the pleasure of hearing a presentation from Joseph Kimble, a…

Have you ever considered how capitalization can affect the meaning of your sentences? Take a look at these two sentences and notice how one capitalized word can completely change the meaning of the sentence.

Sentence 1: Help Uncle…

When looking at the careers section of your local weekend paper, you’ll find some great examples of how not to write a list. Here’s an example:

What you will do:

Conclusions often don’t get the time they deserve. Typically, they are dashed off with little thought, and therefore are full of clichés, bulky, bureaucratic phrases and missing information.

There are three things to keep in mind when…

You may have been told that you shouldn’t use a comma before the word and. However, you need to be careful – this statement is not always true. Here’s an example of where it’s important to use a comma before the and…

Many things influence whether or not you express numbers in figures or in words. Sometimes it’s your profession, and sometimes it’s the editing style of your organization.

Here are some common number usage guidelines to follow in order…

Continual and continuous can’t be used interchangeably. While some people consistently use continuous, other people consistently use continual. For the most part, it’s because they don’t realize that there is another similar word to use, or…

If there’s one saying that will always be true, it’s “quality over quantity”. This saying is very helpful in reminding us that a long sentence leads to a frustrated reader. If the reader even reads the whole thing!

The general…

Many of our grammar errors are due to the errors we make when we use a structure in speech.  However, if we want to write correctly, we need to not only identify those errors, but to also understand why they are incorrect and how to fix…