A new year means new budgets for your clients and prospects and new opportunities to propose your services and products. You may find yourself offering a proposal in one of two situations: 1) You send an unsolicited proposal to persuade the reader he or she needs your product or service; or 2) The reader is [...]
Grammar and clarity are inseparable. Grammatical mistakes can either muddy your message or mar your image. —TEN— Pronouns after than: “He’s taller than me.” Finish the sentence to hear the correct choice after than or as. Correct: “He’s taller than I [am tall].” —NINE— Irregular verb go: “They had went to the store.” Gone is [...]
With the advent of smart phones, social media, and texting, we’re writing more—not less—than five years ago. And more people write more. We used to pick up the phone for day-to-day tasks. But so many people screen their calls with voicemail that we’ve found it faster and easier to get through by writing than calling. [...]
Having taught business and technical writing for 3 decades in almost half the Fortune 500 corporations, I’ve literally been reading your mail. Well, okay, maybe not YOUR mail. But I’ve read and discussed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of emails, letters, proposals, and reports with both writers and recipients to discover their intentions and [...]
“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 [...]
You’ve heard this old adage: Never call “Help” in a crowded street while trying to explain a problem to passersby. People will simply ignore you, mistaking you for a crank, a crackpot, or a crook. Instead, the police advise you to yell, “Fire.” A short shout that appeals to self-interest gets attention. The same proves [...]
Catching grammar goofs could be an entertaining game as they pop up in social media—-if the prevalence of such errors didn’t make it boring child’s play. But occasionally, something surprises me. I grabbed my bowl of cereal and sat down to the breakfast table this morning only to read this copy in big bold print [...]
—“As we discussed when I made you aware of the problem with X…” —“As you may recall on May 4 that issue surfaced and no decision was announced at that time, so the assumption seemed to be that…” —“To follow up our phone conversation in which you instructed me to…” If your documents and those [...]
I’ll admit it right upfront: I’m not the best at parallel parking. Mark me down for at least two or three tries on each occasion. But when it comes to thinking, I show marked improvement. Why’s this so important? Parallelism leads to comprehension. Without it, confusion reigns. Yet, otherwise very bright people make parallelism errors often in their speeches, [...]
