Business Writing Tips
The post is a cheat sheet for those who write for or in the business community. It is basically an overview of the most common mistakes made, which vary from the standard. I keep a hard copy nearby to remind me that the only impression many people have of me comes from the written material they read.
Extremely Serious Deviations From the Standard:
- Incorrect verb forms (”he brung,” “he was,” he don’t”).
- Double negatives.
- Sentence fragments.
- Subjects in the objective case (”Him and Jones are going”).
- Fused sentences (”He loved his job he never took holidays”).
- Failure to capitalize proper names, especially those referring to people and places.
- A comma between the verb and complement of the sentence. E.g., (”Cox cannot predict, that street crime will diminish”).
Serious Deviations From Standard:
- Faculty parallelism.
- Subject-verb disagreement.
- Adjectives used to modify verbs (”He treats his men bad”).
- Not marking interrupters such as “However” with comma.
- Subjective pronouns used for objects (”The Army sent my husband and I to Japan”).
- Confusion of the verbs “sit” and “set”.
Moderate Deviations From Standard:
- Tense shifting.
- Dangling modifiers.
- Failure to use quotation marks around quoted material.
- Plural modifier with a singular noun (”These kind”).
- Omitting commas in a series.
- Faulty predication (”The policy intimidates applications”).
- Ambiguous use of “which.”
- Objective form of a pronoun used as a subjective complement (”That is her across the street”).
- Confusion of the verbs “affect” and “effect.”
Minor Lapses From Standard:
- Failure to distinguish between “whoever” and whomever.”
- Omitting commas to set off interrupting phrases such as appositives.
- Joining independent clauses with a comma; that is, a comma splice.
- Confusion of “its” and it’s”.
- Failure to use the possessive form before a gerund (”The company objects to us hiring new salespeople”).
- Failure to distinguish between “among” and “between.”
Insignificant Lapses From Standard:
- A qualifying word used before “unique” (That is the most unique plan we have seen”).
- “They” used to refer to a singular pronoun (”Everyone knows they will have to go”).
- Omitting a comma after an introductory clause.
- Singular verb form used with “data” (”The data is significant”).
- Linking verb followed by “when” (”The problem is when patients refuse to cooperate”).
- Using a pronoun “that” to refer to people.
- Using a colon after a linking verb (”The causes of the decline are: inflation, apathy, and unemployment”).
The good news is, a good word processing program will catch most of these while you are still in draft form.