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Is it between or among?

September 19, 2011

Many believe that between is appropriate when there are two people or things involved, and among is appropriate when there are more than two people or things involved. While this might give you the right answer some of the time, it isn’t strickly correct and you could end up creating awkward feeling sentences like:

Tensions among Canada, Mexico, and the United States eased following the implementation of the NAFTA agreement.

The reason this may feel awkward is because it’s wrong. The correct sentence is:

Tensions between Canada, Mexico, and the United States eased following the implementation of the NAFTA agreement.

Here’s why.

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Writing Succinctly

July 30, 2010

Writing succinctly, using as few words as necessary, is probably the biggest challenge facing most writers. Most of us use words and phrases in writing that we would never use when speaking. However once we’ve written the words, we feel like we are going in the wrong direction if we remove them. Yet, one big advantage writing offers over speaking is that we can refine our message, making it as succinct as possible.

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Making a list and checking it twice

June 17, 2010

We all love lists, not just the jolly fellow in red, and most of us can’t get through a day without them. Not only do lists seem to bring order to chaos and help us remember things, but they are easy to spot among paragraphs of text. We notice them, read them, and then, if they are interesting enough, we might read the surrounding text. When we are writing lists we don’t need to concern ourselves with crafting clever sentences, we just need to jot down the keywords.

As writers, we need to compose our lists correctly. Although the principles are fairly straightforward, they are not necessarily well-known.

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The semicolon, more that just a wink

December 13, 2009

Use of the semicolon has increased recently by combining it with a hyphen followed by a closing parenthesis to indicate a wink ;-) (tip your head to the left), but otherwise it is often avoided because writers aren’t confident how to use it.

The semicolon (;) is a delightful looking punctuation mark that provides a grammatical break that is greater than a comma, and less than a period (or full stop). So let’s look at four other ways we can use the semicolon.

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What to do about acronyms

October 15, 2009

Acronyms, those 2, 3, 4, and sometimes 5 letter short forms, are everywhere.

• If we’re hungry we might get a BLT, or maybe some OJ and a PBJ sandwich, or maybe some KD.
• At home we might switch on ESPN and watch an NHL game or an NBA game or an NFL game or an MLB game or the PGA tournament.
• We worry about our kids having ADHD and we watch our BMI and restrict the amount of MSG we consume so we don’t end up in ICU, or in ER, or even worse, DOA. In business, our CEO will discuss our B2B strategy with FT and PT employees.
• We may have a B2C service that is open 24/7 that our CFO claims is too inefficient so he asks the CTO to get the IT department to make it cost effective.
• And let’s not even get started with our computer life where we surf the WWW using a URL to find a BLOG site or review our RSS feeds or go to a P2P site to listen to a new band.

But did you know that acronyms are a 20th Century thing. The first time the word acronym was defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was 1949. Boy have we come a long way since then.

The word acronym comes from the Greek word akros, meaning topmost or extreme, and onoma meaning name. So acronyms are extreme names. Using them is not as dangerous as some extreme sports, but we do need to be careful not to hurt our readers with them.

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Capitals in headings

March 5, 2009

We often feel uncertain about how to capitalize words in headings. “Should everything be capitalized?”; “Isn’t there are rule about not capitalizing articles and prepositions, and what is a preposition anyway?”

There are some very hard an fast rules about how to capitalize English words in sentences, to learn about these see the article When to capitalize. However, when it comes to capitalizing headings, there are only hard and fast suggestions and expectations, but no rules. In the absence of rules, we at least want to be consistent, so publishing organizations have developed styleguides that include recommendations on how to capitalize headings. The five styleguides that influence most of the publications we read include the American Psychological Association (APA) Publication Manual, the Canadian Press (CP) Stylebook, the Chicago Manual of Style, the Modern Language Association (MLA) Handbook, and the Plain Language Commission (PLC) recommendations. The reason we find capitalizing headings confusing is that each one has different recommendations.

To help us figure out what to do, let’s quickly review the recommendations of each of these styleguides, and then finish with some advice from common business writing experience.

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Writing with numbers

January 27, 2009

Technical writing often includes the copious use of numbers. Everybody has their favourite way of writing these numbers out and sometimes these are just fine; other times these can be very confusing to the reader. In many cases the grammatical and punctuation rules for using number are very clear, but many of us never learned them, especially if our training was for more literary writing. So here are some rules and some advice to remember when writing with numbers.

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When to capitalize

November 6, 2008

Capitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule (upper case letter) and the remaining letters in minuscules (lower case letters). The term is also used more broadly to refer to any aspect of using upper and lower case letters.

Here are a number of rules to help decide when we should capitalize words in a sentence.

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Choose your typeface with care

October 30, 2008

When all we had for printed communication was the typewriter, we didn’t need to consider typeface or fonts, we had no choice. Now however, with Words Processors and Page Layout programs being so readily available we have some choices about the typeface we use. Even before Word Processors, the influence of type on readers was well understood; it just wasn’t something that most of us needed to understand. Now we do.

When we read, we read with a voice in our head. The tone and personality of that voice are dictated by the typeface we use. Typeface is the non-verbal part of our communication and it plays a very important role in the whole communication.

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Commonly confused words

October 16, 2008

English is widely regarded as having become the global language and is the dominant international language in communications, science, and business. You would think that with English being so prominent in arenas of logic and commerce, that it would be concise, precise, and devoid of ambiguity. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Doug Larson stated: “If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.”

Here is a list of English words that are often confused and a description of their correct usage.

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