If I were to ask you what are the things about your incoming email that are most likely to drive you right over the edge some day, what would you say?
Here are the most common, perhaps not-so-surprising answers most often given at my email workshops across the country:
1. Emails sent “reply all,” or to an entire emailing list, rather than just to those few who really have a need for the information
[Image source]
Writers INC is a valuable resource for writers of all ages and all genres. While intended for high school students, it contains a wealth of essential information that is relevant to business writers.
A quick look at the Writers INC table of contents:
Continue reading
Happy New Year, everyone!
My granddaughter shared a funny story with me. She works in a middle school and was helping a student revise his work. The assignment was to make a comic strip about a scene in the book Jennifer Murdley’s Toad, and this particular student chose the scene where the young woman protagonist is humiliated because she has to wear her brother’s underpants and everyone at school finds out. (It is a very amusing book, to say the least!) Continue reading
Get Ready:
1. Start the easy way. Use your spell checker—remember, it will “OK” any word that is correctly spelled, whether or not it’s correctly used
2. Use the grammar checker. Make sure you understand what it’s trying to tell you.
3. Leave some time between inputting the material and proofreading it. Overnight is good. When possible, try to schedule proofreading when you’re fresh, and there are the fewest distractions.
There’s a lot more to your word processing program than just spell checker!
For most PC and MAC versions of MS Word:
These five steps will improve your spelling.
1. Read more, making note of any word that does not seem to be spelled correctly. After you have finished your reading, check the spelling of each listed word in the dictionary. Add each correctly-spelled word to your personal “hit list” of frequently misspelled words.
2. Obtain a package of “sticky note” pads. There will probably be about 20 sheets per pad.
3. Using the entire pad, write each misspelled word from your “hit list” once on each page of a “sticky note” pad (about 20 pages).
A preposition is a connecting word that shows the relationship between words in a sentence, and elaborates meaning. A prepositional phrase begins with one of the prepositions below. A very common mistake is to match the verb in the sentence to the word at the end of the prepositional phrase, rather than to the subject of the sentence (“A selection of three entrees is available at dinner” is correct; “A selection of three entrees are available at dinner” is incorrect). By learning to recognize a preposition when you see is, you can avoid this grammatical error.
Continue reading
Try out your writing skills! See if you can correct the errors in the following sentences.
Answers after the cut…