If Abraham Lincoln had used Grammarly when he wrote the Gettysburg Address, he might have doubted himself. Running his text through the grammar checker, he would have received suggestions like: Would Grammarly’s ideas have yielded a tighter, more concise document? Probably. Would that document still be remembered 150 years later? Probably not. Because the things […]
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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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In the endless hustle to get work out the door (or onto the email server) faster, it is easy to short-change the proofreading process. When we do this, errors follow. Here are a few tips: If you add a few words to your message after you’ve finished your main proofreading, read it again before you
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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
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Some common phrases are hard to tell apart. Here is a brief guide to a few common trouble-makers. Compared To vs. Compared With When making an analogy to something of an entirely different class, use compare to. He compared leading a company through recessionary times to steering an ocean liner through a storm. Compared to
