I hope you find my writing and business tips and observations useful. My business and blog are dedicated to helping businesses communicate clearly and reach their potential.
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Surprise mention in survey
I did a survey today which was ok on the whole but question 5 had a surprise element in it. Note I did not know who was behind the survey (deliberately to get unbiased answers).
The question was in effect “Are you primarily a business or personal customer of these services?”
The answer options were “personal/business/equal/I am no longer a customer of Company X”
So the anonymous-to-get-unbiased-answers aspect was thrown out the window with that answer which is not so good. It also didn’t mean a lot as I never said I had been a Company X customer, nor even acknowledged I’d heard of company X before. The fourth answer didn’t even answer the question so was completely irrelevant.
The lesson is to read every answer with the question before you finalise a survey or any other multiple choice list – this also applies for a bulleted list in that each point must complete a sentence from the introduction.
From the above example…
“Are you primarily a business or personal customer of these services?” “personal” works
“Are you primarily a business or personal customer of these services?” “no longer a customer of Company X” doesn’t work.
If you are writing or editing a survey, ensure you read each answer with the question in this way to get a polished, sensible result.
Proofreading tips
Ok, proofreading is boring – not many people actually enjoy the thought of reading their work over and over again to find errors. It’s a bit better proofreading someone else’s work, but most people still don’t want to do it.
However, like many things in business and in life, it is necessary.
Necessary that is if you want a professional finish to your written materials.
So here are my tips to make it as easy and painless as possible:
- hire a proofreader! Ok, I added this point for fun as a plug (yes i can proof read and edit for you!) although it is a valid option
- get someone else to read it for you – fresh eyes are more likely to spot errors and other issues
- use a spell check to find the obvious typos (e.g. teh and yuo) BUT do not rely on it alone as it will not pick up the wrong word (e.g. know and now are both real words) and may not use your local or preferred spelling (e.g. color vs colour)
- leave as much time as possible between writing/editing and proofreading (or subsequent rounds of proofreading) – a few days is ideal but overnight is a minimum. If time really is short, do something else in between so your mind has ‘forgotten’ some of the details
- read it out loud – your tongue often trips over things your eyes would accept
- read it backwards – that way you will read the actual words instead of the sentences so spelling errors are more obvious
- print it rather than read it on a screen – not only is this easier on your eyes, it gives a different visual perspective and you can even read it away from your desk. I find curled up on a couch is great for editing printed documents…
- change magnification of the text – seeing it bigger sometimes makes words stand out more
Some tips will suit you more than others, some will be more appropriate for particular documents, too. However, using a range of techniques (especially for more important documents) will help you achieve a higher quality document.
Which punctuation mark do I use?
Sometime when using quotation marks at the end of a sentence or phrase, it would seem that two punctuation marks are required (one for the quote and one for the sentence).
However, you only ever use one punctuation mark, whether it is a full stop, exclamation mark, question mark, or anything else, at the end of a sentence.
In order to know which one to use, consider which is more powerful and use that one.
Some examples:
The teacher yelled out ‘Quiet!’
Did you say ‘John will fix my car’?
Someone might wonder ‘why did he choose that colour?’
Maintaining the flow of ideas
Writing with disjointed ideas that don’t flow from one to another is not easy to read and not a good advertisement for you. So how can you make your writing flow?
- My first tip is to proof read everything you write – preferably after a decent break from it and by someone else for anything important. It is easy to write down things as they occur to you but reading it later will show the lack of flow
- Qualify any alternative perceptions, usually words such as although, however, despite and but will help things flow better. For example “I think chocolate is best. Caramel has more flavour” doesn’t flow as well as “I think chocolate is best although caramel has more flavour.”
- plan your messgae before you write it – if you know what each paragraph is about before you start, you are less likely to include irrelevant material
- Remember that you don’t have to include everything you know about a topic in one piece of writing (even a thesis will have appendices and refer to external material!) Trying to include every fact and all points of view often leads to disjointed results so just include the details relevant to your purpose
- Check each paragraph covers only one idea and then review the order of the paragraphs so that information builds on itself and related ideas are in subsequent paragraphs. The beauty of word processing software is that you can move paragraphs and sentences around easily until they are in the right order for ideas to flow – not as easy to manage with pen and paper or a typewriter!
Is maintaining the flow of ideas in your writing something you consciously work on?
Using apostrophes
Many people claim that they don’t understand apostrophes. At least, they don’t understand where to put them!
Basically, an apostrophe indicates that someone or something owns something else. For example, the boy’s dog – the boy owns the dog.
For a singular owner, it’s easy. The apostrophe and an s come after the word – boy’s, Mary’s and woman’s.
Its also easy if a plural term exists, such as men’s, crowd’s, children’s and management’s.
If the owner ends in s, the apostrophe comes after the s without an additional s. So the horses’ stable and the Smiths’ house are correct.
Apostrophes are also required in abbreviations to show letters are missing. For instance, are not becomes aren’t and do not becomes don’t.
The trickiest word is its…
It’s is the abbreviation of it is; the possessive term is its. So it’s raining today, but the horse lost its shoe.
So there are no apostrophes for decades, numbers, plural abbreviations or plural items – some correct examples are
– during the 60s
– she bought some CDs
– find all the As
– look at my photos
– he is in his 90s
– a list of URLs
– the babies are sleeping
– we will have three pizzas please.
Absolute words
Earlier in the week I wrote a post about products being exclusively available in one department store being a misleading statement (things are either exclusive or they aren’t!) and it reminded me of an article I wrote in my newsletter some time ago (it was my November 2004 newsletter to be precise!)
Here is what I wrote back then:
Don’t over qualify
There are a group of words that have very precise meanings – these words don’t need any qualifying to make them strong, and in fact it is grammatically wrong to attempt qualifying them.
For instance, the word unique means one of a kind so something is either unique or it isn’t – ‘very unique’, ‘particularly unique’, ‘most unique’ and similar combinations are unnecessary.
Other words that are commonly misused in this way are:
Electrocuted – the word actually means to be killed by electricity, not receive an electric shock.
Perfect – means there can be no improvement; adding ‘very’ to it doesn’t serve any purpose.
Fatal – means deadly. An accident is fatal or it isn’t, it can’t be ‘very fatal’ or ‘really fatal’.
In most of these examples, they can be qualified by using a word such as ‘almost’ or ‘nearly’; the word unique, however, can’t be qualified at all.
What other words can you think of that are absolute in their own right?
Give options that make sense
I have written before about the need to use clear questions in surveys to get meaningful results, and given some tips on how to write such questions. Every time I do a survey with poor questions I cringe – do they really not care about getting good results or just don’t understand that not everyone knows what they are really asking?
One of the most common questions I have seen in online surveys is the following:
Are you …
male
female?
Technically, the answer is yes – I am male or female and so is every other human I know of! Fairly pointless question to ask unless you have a third group responding.
In this case, we can see what is really being asked (“which are you?”) and the available answers lead us to answering correctly, but it isn’t always so easy.
It was great recently to be asked to help a major research centre refine their questionnaire. They had determined the questions they wanted to ask but understood that how they asked was critical to the final result of their research.
So if you are preparing surveys or questionnaires, my two key tips are:
- read the questions to make sure the options answer the question and suit your needs
- get at least one other person to read the questions to ensure they make sense to a less involved pair of eyes
Use your words wisely!
One little letter…
One little letter can make a huge difference.
I have just come across an example of why it is critical to proof read everything before you publish it, and why attention to details such as spelling and grammar are important.
Actually, I first saw this site about 8 months ago and they still haven’t noticed or corrected it. I had forgotten it but for my amusement I’m glad it was still there!
In the header of every page of the site, they have used an a instead of u in their tagline. One little letter could be a simple typo, of course, but your tagline and header are the first things people notice! And in this case, it doesn’t look like a typo as it makes a real word which gives a VERY different meaning.
The tagline in the header is “Pass a drag test no sweat” which instantly brings to mind men dressing as women (testing to see if they are real drag queens is perhaps unusual but I guess we don’t want people pretending to be in drag?)
Elsewhere, they use the tagline “Pass a drug test no sweat” which related to the fact they sell “products is removing unwanted substances from your body and provides for quick detoxification of your organism.”
I’m not going to touch the rights and wrongs of passing drug tests this way, but it is clear that there is a huge difference between drag and drug.
So check your work carefully and don’t just rely on spell checks to get your work correct.
Use your words wisely!
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