I received an email recently that contained the signature line: “Expect typos.” Why should I expect typos? I expect people to avoid them, especially in business correspondence. Cell phones breed typos. Granted, when one is typing with thumbs on a tiny screen, errors are more likely to creep in. But this does not mean that […]
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Email misjudgments can land people in jail. Just ask James A. Brown, ex-Merrill Lynch executive who wrote in an email that Enron had “promised” that Merrill would get their money back in a suspicious Enron deal involving barges off the coast of Nigeria. According to the Wall Street Journal (10/23/10) “a possible turning point came when investigators
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Hyphens connect multiple words to make one word. They often have a significant impact on the meaning of the word. Sometimes they turn a verb phrase into a noun. Sometimes they connect several words to make an adjective. For example: Set-Up Set up is a verb phrase composed of the verb set and the adverb up. Up tells you in what
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Many people suffer from secret feelings of stupidity because they don’t know how to use the semicolon. They imagine that everyone else knows what to do with this sophisticated mark of punctuation—and that they must have been absent or dreaming on the one day of school when the teacher explained it. Since they assume that
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Writers often struggle over the gnarly question of whether to put a comma before the conjunction and and its fellow conjunctions. And is one of seven coordinating conjunctions which are punctuated similarly. These conjunctions spell out FANBOYS: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. DO Use a Comma Put a comma before and when connecting independent clauses. Remember, an independent clause has a subject and
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