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The Grammar Factor: name change, online pricing change, apostrophes with ‘every’

By Mary Morel | January 2017 Name change I have decided to change the name of my newsletter to ‘All about Words with Mary’. The next issue you receive will no longer be called ‘The Grammar Factor’. Price changes for my online courses Over the holiday period, I changed the pricing model for my online courses.Continue reading

The Grammar Factor: punctuation with however, which and that, board papers

Your grammar questions answered Punctuation with ‘however’ Question: I have a question relating to punctuation when the word ‘however’ is used in a sentence. Workplace law requires hazardous risks to be eliminated, however, if it is not reasonably practicable, then the risks must be minimised. Or Workplace law requires hazardous risks to be eliminated, howeverContinue reading

The Grammar Factor: punctuation with brackets, provided, solely, Facebook group

By Mary Morel | November 2016 Your grammar questions answered Punctuation with brackets Question: A colleague often uses a full stop after a bracket that has an exclamation mark at the end: (So it looks like this!). Is it correct to have a full stop after an exclamation mark in a bracket? I’m sure it’sContinue reading

The Grammar Factor: design with words, ‘he’ or ‘him’ after ‘than’?

By Mary Morel | October 2016 Design with words in Microsoft Word Tips for formatting your Word documents First impressions count and we base our initial judgement of how easy a business document will be to read based on the way it looks. Strict length requirements sometimes encourage writers to do crazy things to theContinue reading

The Grammar Factor: online board paper course, v. for versus, punctuation with viz.

By Mary Morel, September 2016 Online board paper courses I’m creating two new online courses, which will be available in October: Taming Templates: How to use your board templates well Write to Govern: How to write an effective board paper These courses are based on my book, Write to Govern, and the work I’ve doneContinue reading

The Grammar Factor: punctuation with abbreviations, collective nouns, podcasts

By Mary Morel | August 2016 Podcasts about writing I was a laggard when it came to podcasting because I couldn’t get my head around the technology. Now I record over Skype, I can’t understand why I dithered for so long. Since I started podcasting, I have started listening to them more often. What aContinue reading

The Grammar Factor: parts of speech/word classes, initial capital letters

By Mary Morel, July 2016 ‘Word classes’ or ‘parts of speech’? I read an article about word classes recently. Now, I know that the term ‘parts of speech’ has gone out of fashion in favour of ‘word classes’, but wasn’t aware that two other competing terms are ‘lexical categories’ and ‘syntactic categories’. The rationale forContinue reading

The Grammar Factor: avoid overusing initial capitals, write effective emails

By Mary Morel, June 2016 Avoid overusing initial capitals Most editors will tell you they hate the overuse and inconsistent use of initial capitals in business documents – they are unnecessary and ugly. You can avoid overusing initial capitals by thinking of lower case as the norm and using initial capitals only when appropriate. Obviously,Continue reading

The Grammar Factor: capitals in titles and headings, punctuation with brackets

By Mary Morel | May 2016 Capital letters in titles and headings There are two ways of using capital letters in titles and headings: In title case, the first and last words, proper nouns (name of people and places) and ‘important’ words have initial capitals. (‘Important’ words are nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and someContinue reading

The Grammar Factor: styles with lists, gender-neutral pronoun, tree failure

By Mary Morel | April 2016 Styles for bulleted lists I’m sure we’ve all read documents that use different list styles within a few pages. I sometimes wonder if writers have copied and pasted material from elsewhere and forgotten to proofread it. Some of the inconsistencies include: Type of bullet point, e.g. round black, roundContinue reading

 
 

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