GRAMMATICALLY SPEAKING
Back to basics
You may be a whizz in Word, know Office inside out and be excellent in Excel. But nothing will make you and your organisation look more unprofessional than poor spelling and bad grammar SAYS CLAIRE MAHONEY
A survey conducted by the Royal Mail makes it clear that poor communication skills in business are costing companies dear – as much as £41 billion worth of busi- ness could be lost every year because of bad grammar and poor spelling. Nobody wants to admit that they are not very good at spelling and for those of us unfortunate enough to have gone through school during the three decades when gram- mar was not part of the English language syllabus, getting to grips with colons, commas and apostrophes often comes about by having our errors pointed out to us – usually in red pen!
A is for apostrophe Most people struggle with when and where to use apos- trophes. Probably because this small, but often inappro- priately placed, little mark has a number of functions. The most common is to mark out where a letter is miss- ing. This is called a contraction. For example: It’s for it is – as in the statement: it’s common to make mistakes when using apostrophes. The second usage is for posses- sion. With a singular possessive you simply add an apos- trophe and an ‘s’. For example: Kate’s computer. Things get a bit trickier when a word already ends in an ‘s’. For example: James’s phone. Then there are plurals. Here you add an ‘s’ and place the apostrophe after it. For example: The managers’ association.
C is for capital letters There is nothing more difficult to read than a letter or mes- sage peppered too liberally with capital letters. They are, of course, used for proper nouns – ie the names of individual people, places and organisations. Capital letters should also be used for brand names. For example, Sellotape, Hoover, Apple. You should also use them for the days of the week and months of the year. Don’t use email and text as a reason
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to stray into lower case – when communicating for busi- ness keep your caps in the right place.
Commas, colons and semi-colons Commas either get used too much or not at all. Used too much and your text will read like someone having a sneez- ing fit and too little and they won’t be able to stop for breath. Use them in lists but not before and at the end of a list. Don’t use them instead of full stops. Read back a long sentence and see if a full stop would be better. You can also use them to add extra information in a sentence. You can test if they are in the right place by checking if the sen- tence still makes sense with that information removed. Colons are useful to introduce lists or sub-clauses in sen- tences. While semi-colons are used to break up two sepa- rate but related points in a sentence. If you are not sure about using a semi-colon just use a full stop instead.
Spelling The prevalence of American English in the global busi- ness world means that for those of us in the UK it can be a bit of a struggle to maintain British English in our writ- ten communications. There are many words that are spelt differently in American English. Some of the most common ones to remember are: ‘center’ instead of cen- tre, ‘color’ instead of colour, using ‘z’ instead of ‘s’ in words such as organization and nouns ending with ‘ense’ not ‘ence’. Make sure your spellcheck is set to the correct form of English as you’ll find the majority of computers have American English as the default setting. American English aside it has to be said that even some of the most basic words can have unusual spellings that baffle the best of us at times. If there are some you contin- ually struggle with, it might be helpful to have a Post-it note on your machine to remind you or make sure you have a dictionary to hand so you can double check. E
THE DIRTY DOZEN
Below is a list of twelve of the most common mis- spellings according to the Oxford Dictionary (
www.oxforddictionaries.com).
■ Accommodate ■ Argument ■ Believe ■ Committee ■ Definitely ■ Foreign ■ Privilege ■ Tomorrow ■ Rhythm ■ Existence ■ Grammar ■ Unfortunately
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