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Category Archives: UncategorizedPunctuation Changes LivesI wish I could offer attribution to these two punctuation parables but alas I received them unsigned. Nevertheless, they illustrate the important function that punctuation plays in telling the reader how to parse the words on the page. Punctuation both … Continue reading
Posted in Proofreading, Uncategorized, Writing Clearly
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Whither the Apostrophe?On October 22, 2011, Henry Hitchings, author of the upcoming book, The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal titled “Is This the Future of Punctuation?”. In it, he proposes that English … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized, Writing Clearly
Tagged apostrophe, comma, grammar, punctuation, semicolon, writing
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You Can Lead a Horse to Water… plus Lie/Lay, Rise/Raise and Sit/SetI saw a bumper sticker recently that said, “You can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be lead.” This would be funny if it were not incorrect. The past tense and the past participle of lead is … Continue reading Compared To, Different Than and More ImportantSome common phrases are hard to tell apart. Here is a brief guide to a few common trouble-makers. Compared To vs. Compared With When making an analogy to something of an entirely different class, use compare to. He compared leading … Continue reading Writing an Executive SummaryWhat is an executive summary? Is it really just a wrap-up of the contents of an entire report or proposal? Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. Before writing one, the first question relates to its purpose. Every document has … Continue reading How is Editing like Grooming a Dog?I have a dog named Marko. He is a German shepherd and weighs over 75 pounds; people generally consider him to be a big scary-looking dog. The mailman would rather walk around the block than come all the way to … Continue reading
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Who/Whom, Whose/Who’s, Your/You’re, Their/They’reIt often amazes me to see how frequently people confuse the most basic distinctions between subject and object and between words and contractions. A recent Writamin concerns the use of that, which, and who [http://www.worktalk.com/writamins/that-which-or-who.html]. In this week’s post, I … Continue reading
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After a Period, One Space or Two?In a recent blog post, Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist for Slate.com, derided the use of two spaces after periods. He maintains that contemporary typographers require only one space after a period. He attributes the two-space rule to the vagaries of … Continue reading
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Slips of Speech 2Last week I gave a few examples of words and distinctions made clear in a pamphlet from 1922 titled S.O.S.: Slips of Speech. Here are a few more excerpts. Statements in parentheses are mine. Divide Up As divide means to … Continue reading
Posted in Choosing Words Carefully, Uncategorized
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Email Error Helps Land Executive in Prison: How to Avoid Email Land MinesEmail misjudgments can land people in jail. Just ask James A. Brown, ex-Merrill Lynch executive who wrote in an email that Enron had “promised” that Merrill would get their money back in a suspicious Enron deal involving barges off the … Continue reading
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