Your grammar questions answered Punctuation with ‘however’ Question: I have a question relating to punctuation when the word ‘however’ is used in a sentence. Workplace law requires hazardous risks to be eliminated, however, if it is not reasonably practicable, then the risks must be minimised. Or Workplace law requires hazardous risks to be eliminated, however […]
Your grammar questions answered Punctuation with brackets Question: A colleague often uses a full stop after a bracket that has an exclamation mark at the end: (So it looks like this!). Is it correct to have a full stop after an exclamation mark in a bracket? I’m sure it’s wrong but not sure why! Answer: […]
Design with words in Microsoft Word Tips for formatting your Word documents First impressions count and we base our initial judgement of how easy a business document will be to read based on the way it looks. Strict length requirements sometimes encourage writers to do crazy things to the layout such as reduce the font […]
By Mary Morel, September 2016 Online board-paper course Read about my new board-paper course, Write to Govern. Reader’s comment: v. for versus ‘A quick observation about versus, vs. and vs usage in the U.S.: we sometimes use v. An example is the famous U.S. Supreme Court case known as “Rowe v. Wade.” Maybe this is […]
August 2016 Podcasts about writing I was a laggard when it came to podcasting because I couldn’t get my head around the technology. Now I record over Skype, I can’t understand why I dithered for so long. Since I started podcasting, I have started listening to them more often. What a great way to make […]
By Mary Morel, July 2016 ‘Word classes’ or ‘parts of speech’? I read an article about word classes recently. Now, I know that the term ‘parts of speech’ has gone out of fashion in favour of ‘word classes’, but wasn’t aware that two other competing terms are ‘lexical categories’ and ‘syntactic categories’. The rationale for […]
By Mary Morel | June 2016 Avoid overusing initial capitals Most editors will tell you they hate the overuse and inconsistent use of initial capitals in business documents – they are unnecessary and ugly. You can avoid overusing initial capitals by thinking of lower case as the norm and using initial capitals only when appropriate. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]