I asked a bunch of comms professionals the other day to share with me their bugbear mistakes that they're always correcting in other people's writing, and they didn't disappoint. Here are some of the classic writing mistakes that crop up time and again. If you spot some you make yourself, here's your chance to correct them for next time.
Adding capital Letters to Random words in a Sentence. Lots of people think there are rules about certain words needing a capital letter when in fact they don't. A really common one is job titles. But generally you should only do this when you're writing the job title before the person's name, so Managing Director John Smith, rather than John Smith, the managing director.
Here are the times when you need to use a capital in your writing.
* At the start of a sentence.
* When using a proper noun - the name of something - John Smith, Waterloo, Barclays, Google etc.
* If you're writing the title of something you might capitalise the first letter of critical words. E.g. The Wonder and Beauty of Capital Letters in Business Writing. But a more modern approach I think would be to just use sentence case for titles, where you only capitalise the first word.
*Acronyms like BBC, ITV, UAE but beware some acronyms include lower case letters MoT, DfE (Department for Education).
* Certain contractions like SciFi you would cap the first letters representing the two original words [Science Fiction].
Remember, when we do a lot of communicating in the virtual space it's really easy to misconstrue tone of voice so it's especially important not to use ALL CAPS which is basically shouting at your audience.
The grocer's apostrophe.
This is such a classic and to be fair most of us know not to add an apostrophe to orange's or potatoe's, but apostrophes do still trip a lot of people up and have a habit of sneaking into words where they might look right but they really aren't.
Remember apostrophes mostly denote ownership. Those are Sharon's oranges. John's shop had an offer on potatoes.
But people often sneak them into words like photos [photo's] or dates like 80s, 90s [80's, 90's] or for example FAQs [FAQ's]. Just remember that you're not describing something that belongs to the photos or the Frequently Asked Questions, so you don't need the apostrophe.
The one example of ownership that confuses people is its / it's. It's is a contraction of 'it is'. It's imperative that you remember this rule about its to get your business writing accurate. When you're talking about an 'it' owning something you lose the apostrophe. The dog had buried its bone.
And of course the many contractions that we use now: you're, [you are] she's [she is], they're [they are], where'd [where did], don't [do not], isn't [is not], I'm [I am], here's [here is], could've [could have], what's [what is]. And so on. A special shout out for who's [who is]. People just love sneaking an apostrophe into that when they really mean 'whose'.
Keep an eye on that man who's dressed as a clown and whose shirt is on back-to-front.
Bear in mind that some of these contractions - could've, where'd etc - are probably too casual for business writing and you should write them out in full.
Of instead of have.
And speaking of could've, because we often write now the way we speak, 'of' has become a really common error when people really mean have. You should spot this and remove it if it turns up in your writing. We really should have turned left there. [Not we really should of...]
The group would have voted to get pizza but Gordon can't eat cheese. [Not the group would of...]
I or me?
Most people remember that when writing about yourself you use the word 'I' and that the convention is to write Beyonce and I visited the conference, not me and Beyonce.
But there are times when it is grammatically correct to use 'me', and using 'I' just sounds weird. Can you tell John and I about your experience? sounds ok, but is actually wrong. In this example you should be using 'me'. The trick to checking whether you're using it correctly is to take John out of the equation and see if it still works. Then you can see that saying Can you tell I about your experience? just sounds wrong.
People who love writing get very passionate about it and the Facebook thread I started got really animated with people sharing examples of the things they come across all the time that drive them mad. It was a lot of fun. I've saved some more up for another post, but these four quick tips - correct use of capitals, apostrophes, have and I / me - are fantastic fixes you can spot and apply straight away to make your business writing more accurate.
Why not click through to my Business Writing Skills course outline to see some of the other common mistakes that we can fix and improve?