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 […]
By Mary Morel, November 2015 Third person writing A reader’s comment about the conversational use of ‘you’ (see ‘Pet peeve’ below), and the article referenced below about ‘we’, made me think about the use of third person writing. In formal business writing, such as board papers and business cases, most writing guidelines encourage writers to […]
By Mary Morel | September 2015 A few nit-picking hours People who don’t know me well sometimes tell me they’re nervous when they email me because I’ll pick up on their grammar. They don’t realise that I switch off my nit-picking brain most of the time for two reasons: Finding mistakes all the time would take […]
By Mary Morel | August 2015 Hanging hyphens A colleague consulted me this month about hanging hyphens (also called suspended or floating hyphens). For example: ‘short- and long-term plans’. I don’t like hanging hyphens, so I would write ‘short and long-term plans’. I think omitting the hanging hyphen is cleaner, but since that is not […]
By Mary Morel | July 2015 Commas with ‘and’ Several business writers have told me they were taught never to put a comma before ‘and’. Now, I could understand if they’d been told not to put one after ‘and’, but before? So I decided to look at occasions when we can use a comma before […]
By Mary Morel | June 2015 Writing standards for clear communication Dana Skopal, PhD, wrote a blog for my Write to Govern website recently, but what she says applies to all writing. Here’s an excerpt from the blog: ‘Many people would view writing as putting sentences together and using correct grammar and punctuation. Sentences, grammar […]
By Mary Morel | May 2015 Windows is shutting down By Clive James Windows is shutting down, and grammar are On their last leg. So what am we to do? A letter of complaint go just so far, Proving the only one in step are you. Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes. A sentence […]
By Mary Morel | April 2015 Online course offer Just a reminder that the 25{59910f22c4b8b7fb83f8b3fd8107c48ae8d88d19cbd345b9801bf252f54d31e2} discount with the coupon 25offapril is available until the end of the month. This offer is to celebrate relaunching the website. You enter this coupon when you reach the cart. Numbering conventions in business writing The terms ‘numbers’ and ‘numerals’ […]