Your Highness: I hold a job that requires I write articles, press releases, and similar pieces in which I quote others. You’d think I’d have such matters down by now, but I’ll come clean: I never really learned the rules for using quotation marks. To complicate matters further, I’m a bit of an Anglophile—only the [...]
Posts Tagged ‘grammar’
The Anti-Valentine: Seven Things Not to Say or Write on February 14
You’ve made it through 364 days without killing your relationship. Good for you! Now it’s Valentine’s Day – the day your Significant Other will scrutinize everything about you. Even your grammar. If you can just get through February 14 without committing a major gaffe, you should be OK for another year. Here are seven costly [...]
Feeding the World With Good Grammar
An ingenious teacher uses a UN-sponsored online game to teach grammar–and philanthropy.
Excuse Your Typos? No I Won’t, Actually
As our fingers fly across our smartphones, we’ve developed a shorthand way to dash off messages without spending too much time on the finer points of spelling and grammar. “C U later” and “gr8” substitute for actual language when we’re communicating via the small screen. Makes you wonder what the great writers would have done [...]
How to Write a More Readable Marcomm Asset
When we’re aiming for highly readable text, we should use words with fewer syllables and write sentences that don’t ramble. Here’s how to follow the stats to top readability.
What’s My E-mail Saying Behind My Back?
Your Highness:
Many of my business contacts and coworkers know me primarily through e-mail; the impression I make is almost entirely via the written word. What can I do to avoid embarrassing myself in writing? The Grammar Queen points the way.
The very best style guide reference books
If you’ve read the fabulous Grammar Queen’s post on creating a corporate style guide (and if you haven’t read it, do so right now), you know you must make some decisions about how your organization crosses the t’s and dots the i’s. However, you can’t possibly list every grammar or style rule in your own [...]
How do I create a corporate style guide?
Your Highness: I work in marketing at a midsized technology firm. My boss tells me we need a style guide. Yesterday. And I’m just the person to produce it. While I do some writing as part of my job, and I can put commas where they belong—OK, most of the time—I’m not a writer or [...]
Is my writing too passive?
Your Highness: This letter is being written because I’ve been told that there is a problem with my writing. Specifically, a problem with the passive voice. But understanding this is difficult. I mean, my job is in marketing. I’m supposed to be good with words. And language has always come easily to me—out-of-the-box thinking is [...]
