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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. Read, subscribe to my newsletter, enjoy!Tash

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grammar & details

Polite emails

Writing thank youWriting an email is so quick and easy that sometimes we forget it is in writing and still reflects on how we are perceived.

For starters, emails should be just as polite as letter or face-to-face contact. Apart from being likely to get a positive response to good manners, it is simply a sign of respect and professionalism.

I recently received an email from someone who runs a network which I don’t participate in. The second paragraph started with “If you are not a fan of using Forums, perhaps now is a good time to change your attitude.”

It didn’t help that there was no greeting to start the email (It opened with “Just a reminder to go to the Forum”)

I found this quite rude and it actually made me less likely to join her forums in case that is how I would be treated there as well. She made no allowance for people being busy, having concerns over online security* or not knowing how to use a forum – she just assumed I have a bad attitude and that I should change it to suit her.

So how do you keep an email polite?

  • start with a greeting, and preferably use the person’s name

  • use words like please and thank you

  • don’t insult people – if you must say something negative, put it in positive or constructive terms

  • be brief so you don’t waste their time

  • use proper sentences so it is easy to understand and you look intelligent and literate

  • treat the reader with respect – if you wouldn’t say it to their face, it isn’t appropriate to write it either

* Her email mentions that non-members can read the posts so I would have concerns about the security of the site.

Quotation marks

Have you ever noticed how many unnecessary quotation marks are used?

I once wrote the following as a guest blogger:

Quotation marks seem to be fashionable at the moment, which is a shame as they are being used so badly! “Recommended by doctors and mothers” makes me feel like they are telling me a lie – if it is a genuine statement, why does it need to be in quotation marks?

Quotation marks are correctly used to: 

– indicate you are quoting someone

– indicate speech (e.g. He said “How are you?”)

 – present a title of something

– show the text lacks credibility or truth, or at least is not verifiable (e.g. The media release stated the product was “superior”)

If you are tempted to use quotation marks for emphasis, try bold, italics, underline, colour, indenting or size of font instead – it will stand out more and not send any incorrect messages!

So I was rather amused when I came across a blog dedicated to silly use of quotation marks. I hope you enjoy seeing these grammatical blunders, as well as getting tips for your own writing!

Style Sheets

Business writing, well good business writing, is made up of a lot of elements. One important element that isn’t mentioned very often is consistency.

While consistency in style, design and so forth are important, I am talking about consistency within the content itself.

It can be consistency in spelling (advisor or adviser?), capitalisation (Internet or internet?), hyphenation (multi-media or multimedia?), abbreviations (A.T.O. or ATO?) or apostrophes (CDs or CD’s?) Sometimes there is a right or wrong way, but in other cases either way is acceptable. However, switching between them in the same document or on your website can be distracting and even annoying. It also doesn’t send a good message about your attention to detail.

Let’s take the example of adviser and advisor. Both are acceptable spellings of the word, although some dictionaries list advisor as the American spelling; adviser tends to be more common in Australia.

If you are writing a webpage about your services as a business adviser, it is likely you would write adviser quite a few times. And by the time you have written the entire website, you will probably have used adviser at least a dozen or so times.

Now, if you have a strong preference for writing adviser, it will be easy and you probably wrote adviser every time. Likewise if you prefer advisor.

But what if you can never remember which is the ‘right’ way? Or you prefer adviser but whoever wrote the older webpages used advisor and it’s hard to remember which to use.

How can you remember which way to spell adviser? And at the same time remember to keep everything else consistent?

One way is to prepare yourself a style sheet.

How does a style sheet work?

Your style sheet can simply be a list of things to watch out for, or it can be a grid with each square being a letter of the alphabet so you can sort the things to watch out for.

An example style sheet is:

Style Sheet for Word Constructions Blog

Adviser
CDs
database
e.g.
internet
multimedia
program

Next time I need to write about a multimedia program within my blog, I just check that style sheet for the appropriate spelling.

Style sheets can be particularly useful if you have more than one entity to write about. You might have a style sheet for your job and another one for your own business, or maybe you need a style sheet for each client.

Company and product names can also be included in a style sheet as getting these names correct is an important part of branding.

The time it takes to create a style sheet will be paid for by having greater consistency in your writing. And a style sheet makes a great starting point for a style guide later on.

Photos – no apostophe

This is becoming one of my pet hates 🙂

There seems to be an increase in the number of people using an apostrophe when writing about photos – that it, people writing photo’s instead of photos.

“I will bring my photo’s to show you”

What do the photos own? NOTHING! So there is no need for an apostrophe to be there and it annoys pedants like me when it is there!

I’m struggling to think of situations where anyone would talk about photos owning anything so it’s probably fairly safe to say that photos should never have an apostrophe added!

And given that adding an apostrophe is actually more work, I don’t see the appeal myself!

Word Constructions
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs