Blog Archives

CLARITY CLINIC—2 Tips to Sharpen Pronoun Use

Top-level writers edit carefully before sending email or submitting documents. One area of attention—that the spelling and grammar checker may miss—is effective pronoun use. Using pronouns (such as he/him, she/her, it, we/us, and they/them) can improve sentence flow and cohesion. But careless pronoun use can weaken a message and confuse readers. So that your sentences communicate the emphasis and meaning you intend and can be read once and immediately understood, let’s explore two tips for effective pronoun use:

1.    Use a precise noun to name a person, place, thing, or idea  before replacing the noun with a pronoun.  Repeat nouns you want to emphasize, and re-introduce nouns when you begin a new paragraph. Find a nice balance between never using pronouns (which sounds stilted) and using too many pronouns (which sounds weak). Read more ›

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7 tips for Business & Technical Writing gleaned from “25 Commandments for Journalists”

The Writing Center’s November 2013 through January 2014 blogs featured tips adapted from our newly updated Writing Effective Performance Appraisals course. Now we return to tips adapted from our instructor-led and online Business Writing, Technical Writing, and Business Grammar courses.

Tim Radford, former Science, Letters, Arts, and Literary Editor of the British Guardian, collected “25 Commandments for Journalists” for his writers over the years. Among those, the following 7 tips are especially applicable for Business and Technical Writing. Tim Radford’s commandments are presented in italics. The Writing Center’s insertions and suggestions for implementing the commandments are provided in brackets.

 Tip #5—Clarity.  No one will complain because you made something too easy to understand. [To be clear, eliminate all unnecessary words, and include all words necessary for meaning. Define technical vocabulary. Present content in logical order. Enable your computer’s Readability Statistics feature (in your Proofreading options) to gauge whether your sentences’ length interferes with your document’s readability.] Read more ›

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16 Frequently Asked Business Writing Questions

1.  When are “state” and “federal” capitalized?  State and federal are capitalized when part of a proper name such as the name of a federal agency or act, etc. (for example Federal Reserve Bank but federal, state, and local laws).  The terms federal government and government (referring specifically to the United States government) are now commonly written in small letters.  In government documents, however, and in other types of communications where these terms are intended to have the force of an official name, they are capitalized. 

2.  How are “I,” “me,” and “myself” used?  Use I as a subject [Louise and I submitted our reports yesterday.] and after than in comparisons or with understood verbs [She is a faster typist than I (am).].  Use me as an object of a verb [Please put Lila and me on the expense account.] and as the object of a preposition [David assigned the project to Sam and me.].  Use myself when I has already been used as the subject—intensively [I, myself, will handle this.] or reflexively [I hurt myself playing tennis.]. 

3.  What is the difference between “than” and “then”?  Than is a conjunction used in comparisons; then (which rhymes with when) is an adverb indicating time [He is older than I am.  I will see you at dinner and return your book then.]. Read more ›

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