A concise recap of types of dashes First, a quick summary on how to use dashes in formal writing: Dash/Hyphen – use to connect words e.g. ‘well-known’. En dash – to show a range of dates (basically, replaces the ‘to’) e.g. Profits increased from November – October that year. Em Read more
Here are some tips to ensure you pick the right proofreader for your project. I’m going to start with the most contentious subject pricing. Pricing If the price appears too good to be true: it is. Don’t trust it. Newcomers or those without qualifications tend to underbid everyone so they Read more
As someone who had been testing out Grammarly’s services for a few months, … nothing the company does could allay its true underlying problem: its services just aren’t that good. …many of the “fixes” in Grammarly’s advertisements are either unhelpful or actively wrong. For example, in the sentence, “Let’s suppose you’re Read more
Word origins can be fascinating. A computer “bug” is an error, flaw, failure or fault in a computer program or system that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. What do you think? Why do we say, “computer bug” and not computing error? Although, you will hear technical people saying, Read more
I have just canceled my subscription to Grammarly’s writing tool, and after having sent a ranty email to Grammarly’s PR rep I thought it would be helpful to share my criticism of the service. If you listen to its fans you would think Grammarly is the best grammar-checking tool on the market according to Read more
I remember when I was working at Scottish Widows, we received a vast number of emails a day. Some contained important information to read through, but others were too long and meandering, and the same for documents. I wonder how many were skim-read? Being concise is the general rule. Even Read more
I love King’s book On Writing, and recommend that you read it. I wouldn’t say every writer has to write like him, his advice can be genre specific and even he says you need to work on your own style. But he does give some good advice for writers that Read more
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that… …every good writer needs an amicable assistant. My name is Emma, I have proofreading experience with authors, students and businesses. So is it worth hiring a proofreader for your book? Hopefully I can give you some pointers below to help your decision-making process. Read more
In informal writing, we don’t have to worry about the difference as it’s perfectly acceptable to use who. For formal and business writing it comes in handy to know the difference. When to use who If you can replace the word with ‘he’ or ‘she’ then use who. Example: Read more
Don’t be like the book or movie lost in translation; instead, anticipate hiring a proofreader for the final polish of your document (known as translation proofreading). I have proofread film scripts and websites that have been translated via software and via people. The process of translating words or text from Read more