Many things in life come in pairs: Shoes. Earrings. Salt and pepper shakers. Knife and fork. Chop sticks. Bookends. Ping-pong paddles. Pillowcases. Parentheses. Commas. Not all commas. But some commas. You’ll never see an open parenthesis alone—like this ( –unless someone has made a proofreading error and forgotten to add the closing parenthesis. But you’ll [...]
“All your people write long narratives that we have to wade through! We’d have our writing problems licked if we could just get them to jot things down simply in bullet points,” the president snapped at his partner. “Everything can’t be boiled down to bullet points,” the older partner and chairman of the board responded. [...]
“I’m tired of going to court because these lawyers don’t know how to use a which clause or where to put a comma.” A vice president and general counsel of a large oil company made that statement to me early in my career just as he was contracting my training company to lead business writing [...]
To pose a frequently asked question: Does size matter? Document length, that is. Do more details lead to more definitive answers? That question was debated about the healthcare bill and is now being batted around regarding the new financial regulatory legislation. What’s the link between words and worth? Take, for example, the new financial reform [...]
It’s bad enough to dial a “customer service” line and have to listen to a menu of seven options. But it’s even more irritating to get to the end of those seven options, and realize that you have to listen to them again because you can’t remember the direction by the time you get to the end of the spiel.
Are you curious about the three punctuation errors that surface most often when participants bring writing samples to our business and technical writing workshops? Although we haven’t kept a formal list, hands down, these are the three that take top honors: Run-on sentences (missing or inadequate punctuation) The biggest punctuation pitfall that renders a sentence [...]
Recently, I received an email at askdianna@booher.com asking this question: “How can we open closed minds—people who do not want to listen to any arguments or logic?” There are many different ways to tackle this problem, so I’ll spend a few weeks doling out some tips on how to get through to people who can’t [...]
