There’s a common misconception about what people like me do for a living: that when our fingers make that initial contact with the keyboard, brilliance flows forth, creating first drafts that are truly works of art. The reality is quite different. If you read my typical first draft of copy for an article, a website, … Read more
Thanks to a handy tool within Microsoft Word and most other word processors, it’s easy to make your writing tighter and more powerful. That handy tool is the Word Count indicator. And here’s how you can use it to improve your writing: highlight whatever it is that you’re writing, whether that’s a page or a … Read more
About what you say in your marketing materials, that is. I wish that weren’t the case, but it’s absolutely true. I may spend hours trying to get a paragraph just right, even though I know that the audience is only going to glance at it for a couple seconds. You’d never know that from the … Read more
Again and again, I see proof of professional reliance on spellcheckers instead of good old proofreading and editing. Case in point: a Northwest Indiana Times article about funding for safety improvements on the South Shore Railroad. The reporter included this bullet point: “Implementation of Positive Train Control, a federally mandated safety system that tracks the precise location … Read more
Whether mistakes are just amusing, horribly damaging, or simply embarrassing, they don’t belong in your marketing communications materials. That’s why proofreading is so important. That said, there’s a certain kind of error that proofreaders miss more often than any other … and it’s quite embarrassing (well, not as much as substituting a call-in sex line’s … Read more
They can be painful. Of course, I’m referring to arguments about whether it’s okay to use those delightful little word combinations we call contractions. You know them: cannot becomes can’t, will not shortens to won’t, and so forth. When professional writers insert those handy contractions into copy, it often gives birth to a strange reaction … Read more
Strip and stripe are two words that look similar and are pronounced differently. More important, they convey strikingly different meanings. And yet both and their derivatives are constantly being used incorrectly by people who don’t know better. If you see a Facebook post selling a “striped” piece of furniture, it means one of two things. … Read more
Our society is more politically divided than it’s been for quite some time. Rational, respectful discussions have largely been replaced with angry tweets and angrier talking heads. Simple social media posts explode into angry battles in which both sides are so eager to promote their points that they don’t even read what they’re responding to. … Read more
One of the most misused sets of homophones — words that sound alike but are spelled differently and have vastly different meanings — is the principal/principle pair. I recently read a notice about a new project that included a “principle” address as its location. I’ve seen organizations boast about their “guiding principals.” And I’ve seen … Read more
One of the subjects I discuss most often is the tendency to use bigger words when smaller ones are actually more communicative. I blame it on a desire to sound more educated and impressive (and I think it goes back to those papers we wrote in college, when we tried to mask our ignorance by … Read more