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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Do names matter?
When writing, the other important aspect about names is spelling.
If you are writing a note to yourself, obviously the spelling is less important. But as soon as you are writing something for a business use, it is essential you spell names correctly. That includes the names of your colleagues and competitors as well as clients, and also any business names you refer to.
Taking the time to get someone’s name spelt correctly in your records can save you time and the embarrassment of getting it wrong later.
You may not like the spellings emma-lee, elisabeth or mishell, but if that is how someone spells it, that is the way you need to spell it when refering to that person.
Getting it right shows respect; getting it wrong will annoy or even insult the person you are writing about, and can even lose you sales.
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs
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.
Competition in business
Do you run a business? How do you deal with your competition?
I am about to write an article for the Business Mums Magazine on this topic, and the more opinions I have the better the article will be! So please share your thoughts here or answer the survey here – or both of course!
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs
From conference to blog!
Writing a blog seems like an obvious thing for a writer to do and it has been on my to do list for some time, but I never had the time to look into it.
Two weeks ago I went to the inaugral Business Mums Network Conference. It was a fantastic two days and I came out of it with a lot of ideas and plans for my business. Amongst other ideas, was a further incentive to get a blog started, so here it is!
What else did I get from the conference? Well, I am going to change the way my business works so I get more time for writing (which I love) and less time on background communications tasks for my corporate clients. It is important to spend time doing what we love and are good at, rather than filling our hours with ‘stuff’ that may be urgent and even important, but not fulfilling or the most important.
But for now, back to the writing!
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