Writing Skills

Although the apostrophe is tiny, its impact is huge. Here are a few rules you can use when determining apostrophe placement when using contractions.

Apostrophes replace missing letters in contractions. Contractions are when we take…

When looking at the careers section of your local weekend paper, you’ll find some great examples of how not to write a list. Here’s an example:

What you will do:

Conclusions often don’t get the time they deserve. Typically, they are dashed off with little thought, and therefore are full of clichés, bulky, bureaucratic phrases and missing information.

There are three things to keep in mind when…

You may have been told that you shouldn’t use a comma before the word and. However, you need to be careful – this statement is not always true. Here’s an example of where it’s important to use a comma before the and…

Have you ever read the introduction to a letter, only to find that it doesn’t relate well – if at all – to the rest of the it? It’s always an unwelcome surprise.

In business letters, the goal is not to surprise readers; the goal is to…

Many things influence whether or not you express numbers in figures or in words. Sometimes it’s your profession, and sometimes it’s the editing style of your organization.

Here are some common number usage guidelines to follow in order to…

Continual and continuous can’t be used interchangeably. While some people consistently use continuous, other people consistently use continual. For the most part, it’s because they don’t realize that there is another similar word to use, or they…

If there’s one saying that will always be true, it’s “quality over quantity”. This saying is very helpful in reminding us that a long sentence leads to a frustrated reader. If the reader even reads the whole thing!

The general guideline…

Many of our grammar errors are due to the errors we make when we use a structure in speech.  However, if we want to write correctly, we need to not only identify those errors, but to also understand why they are incorrect and how to fix them.…