Your emails have a better chance of being opened and read if you write specific subject lines that catch people’s attention. Keep your subject line short and specific Use phrases rather than single words because a one-word subject line is seldom informative enough. On the other hand, long subject lines take too long to read […]
By Mary Morel | May 2016 Capital letters in titles and headings There are two ways of using capital letters in titles and headings: In title case, the first and last words, proper nouns (name of people and places) and ‘important’ words have initial capitals. (‘Important’ words are nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and some […]
A basic catchcry of business-writing articles and training is ‘write for your audience’. Yet what does this mean in practice? I don’t think this is as straightforward as it sounds and I am going to look at this question from my own experience of: Teaching people how to write better board papers Writing my e-newsletter […]
Styles for bulleted lists I’m sure we’ve all read documents that use different list styles within a few pages. I sometimes wonder if writers have copied and pasted material from elsewhere and forgotten to proofread it. Some of the inconsistencies include: Type of bullet point, e.g. round black, round hollow, dashes, arrows Indentation – flush […]
When to use dashes, parentheses and commas We all insert extra information in sentences at times with dashes, parentheses (also known as brackets) or commas. Sometimes it’s just irresistible to include that additional information that we hope will make our meaning clearer or provide context. But does the extra information make our writing harder to […]
By Mary Morel | March 2016 Styles for shortened words In The Grammar Factor last month, I looked at acronyms, and this month I am looking at shortened words and contractions. Shortened words When a word is abbreviated after the first few letters, the traditional rule is to put a full stop after the abbreviation. If […]
Write emails, especially difficult emails, with more confidence, knowing you’re using the right tone.
By Mary Morel Morel | February 2016 Acronyms The common convention if you want to use an acronym is to spell out the full term the first time and put the acronym in brackets. Then you can use the acronym for the rest of the document. Australian Taxation Office (ATO) All acronyms are abbreviated with […]
By Mary Morel | January 2016 Spacing after end punctuation Question: Should you use one or two spaces after end punctuation? Answer: One space. The Australian Commonwealth Style manual: for authors, editors and printers says: ‘In typewritten (as distinct from typeset) material, it was customary to place two spaces after a colon, semicolon, full stop or […]
By Mary Morel | October 2015 Do styles matter for internal documents? Someone recently asked me what to do if you’re working with different managers who have their own preferred styles, for example, on list punctuation and whether a page should be right-ragged or fully justified. If your organisation has a style guide, the obvious […]