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Six Simple Ways to Improve Your Professional Writing

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copyedittWriting clear, cogent copy is a skill that takes years to perfect. It requires acute attention to detail, passion for accuracy and intense aversion to wasted words. Good writers play with diction and consider cadence. A person could spend hours crafting just a simple paragraph or two.

Most of us, however, don’t have that kind of time to spare. We need to get our ideas across clearly and quickly, while avoiding typos that only serve to make us look bad.

In the name of misplaced commas everywhere, the writers at Tripepi Smith would like to offer up a few simple guidelines that can improve almost any collection of written words.

  • Be concise. A few, powerful words are much harder to write than hundreds of useless ones. Decide exactly what it is you’re trying to say and stick to it.
  • Always edit. Editing is how one turns a long, bloated white paper into a slick, to-the-point presentation of facts. As an exercise, next time you draft something for public consumption, try trimming your final word count by 50%. You’ll be surprised how many words you don’t need.
  • Keep punctuation simple. Put a period at the end of every sentence, and a question mark at the end of every question. A good rule of thumb for commas is to put them where you pause when reading a sentence out loud. Resist the urge to add unnecessary colons, semi-colons, dashes and exclamation points where they’re not really needed. More often than not, a good old sentence does the job just fine.
  • While we’re on the topic of punctuation, always put your periods, commas and question marks inside your quotation marks. For example, the comma at the end of this quote: “It was a beautiful day,” the City Manager said.
  • Google knows grammar (and usage). With the Internet on your side, there’s no need to ever misspell or misuse a word again. Not sure if you mean capital or capitol? Are you feeling weary or wary? Google will tell you in 5 seconds flat.
  • Hit the space bar once. It’s a little known fact that modern word processing programs such as Word automatically make the space after a period slightly larger than other spaces. People who learned to type before 1990 often put two, or even three or four spaces between their sentences. There is no longer any need.

At Tripepi Smith, we revel in the opportunity to play with words. From our content creation services to our quick turnaround on last minute copyediting jobs, our writers are here for you. Call any time.

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