Do you need a hyphen in decision-making? Reader’s question: Should decision making be hyphenated in noun form i.e. decision-making? Answer: You can use either decision making or decision-making in noun form, but decision-making is becoming more common. Just be consistent. Everyone in the team had a role in the decision making. Everyone in the team had […]
Learn some apostrophe rules Apostrofly Definition: an insect that lands at random on the printed page, depositing an apostrophe wherever it lands. Discovered in 2002 by British journalist Ian Mayes. Apostrophes in expressions of time Question: Do you need an apostrophe in ’20 years’ experience’? Answer: Grammar experts don’t agree about apostrophes in time. The […]
Answering your grammar questions 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: […]
Use consistent list punctuation There are several different styles for punctuating a bulleted or numbered list, and the main thing is to be consistent. If your organisation has a preferred style, use that. If you can choose your own style, please don’t use semicolons – they really are very old-fashioned! Punctuation with full-sentence lists Lists that […]
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 […]
Use hyphens to link words for clarity Hyphens glue words together so the reader knows they are linked. Some of the rules for using hyphens are straightforward, but there are several exceptions and often you have to decide whether a hyphen is necessary. That is why some people dislike hyphens and probably why the Oxford University […]
Are hanging hyphens necessary? A colleague consulted me 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 a justification, I researched the topic. […]
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 ‘and’. There are two occasions where a comma can […]
In US English, full stops go inside quotation marks Use of quotation marks We use quotation marks to indicate: Written or spoken speech ‘You’re looking well,’ she said. Titles of reports, articles and poems I read an article ‘Where Boards Fall Short’ in the Harvard Business Review. Words we wish to emphasise Did you know […]
What’s the difference between an acronym and an initialism? An acronym is a string of initial letters that are pronounced as a word, for example, AIDS, which stands for ‘acquired immune deficiency syndrome’. Some acronyms have become such an accepted part of the language that they are seldom spelt out, for example, scuba, sonar and […]