Time For A Quickie

Sometimes I have issues to share, but don’t think there is enough information for an entire blog post, so I’ve gathered a few random topics for this week.

• Towards. I see this all the time and it’s a personal pet peeve of mine (along with incorrect use of apostrophes as pluralization – but I digress). While both “toward” and “towards” are correct, “toward” is more common in the US. Grammar Girl’s quick tip is to remember that Americans like shortcuts, so we cut the “s” off.

• Punctuation at the end of headings. Where you use headings as standalone headings, they should NOT have a period. If the heading is an exclamation or question, you should use those punctuation marks, but not periods. If the heading is a run-in heading (meaning the paragraph follows immediately after the heading), do use punctuation, including a period.

• Capitalization in headings. Basically it is whatever the author prefers – capitalize each word, capitalize each word including prepositions over three letters long but not prepositions under three letters long, capitalize only the first letter of the first word, or all caps all words. My personal preference is the first letter of each word in the heading, but use whatever style the author prefers. My tip is BE CONSISTENT. Pick a preferred style and stick to it throughout the entire document.

• Centering titles. Something I see a lot is a title that is supposed to centered and appears to be centered except that there is an indent of five spaces set up on that line, so it is not exactly centered in the line. If you put your cursor on that line and check to see if the indent on your ruler is set and change it if it is, you will be centered. Soon you should be able to tell by looking at it whether it is centered or not.

• Emails are documents too. Sometimes we forget that emails are a reflection of us too. We send far more emails to far more people so it is even more important to be grammatically correct than it is in documents. Treat your emails like you do your documents and spell check and grammar check them before hitting send. People WILL judge you based on those kinds of mistakes in your emails.

• Be careful about changes. One of the reasons I redline edits for my attorneys is because I don’t want to assume that I know what they want. Sometimes what I think it should be is not what is intended. I had a friend recently who wrote an article and in the editing it ended up to read “tact” rather than “tack” even though her original was correct in context. It is frustrating as an author when something that has your name all over it is edited by someone else and it ends up wrong when your original was correct. Don’t ever assume you know more about grammar than your author. You very well may know more technically, but changing words can sometimes change the entire meaning of a sentence. Be very careful and be absolutely sure of your edit before you just make a change without approval.

Follow