Punctuation at Work: Simple Principles for Achieving Clarity and Good Style

ISBN-13: 9780814414941 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 208 str.

Richard Lauchman

Opis

In the workplace, good punctuation is much more than a matter of correctness. It's a matter of efficiency. Professionals who aren't sure how to punctuate take more time than necessary to write, as they fret about the many inconsistent and contradictory rules they've picked up over the years. Good punctuation is also a matter of courtesy: In workplace writing, a sentence should yield its meaning instantly, but when punctuation is haphazard, readers need to work to understand - or guess at - the writer's intent. Weak punctuation results in time-wasting confusion, questions about professionalism, and some times even serious and costly miscommunication. Without using the jargon of grammar -- and providing 18 common sense principles to live by -- Punctuation at Work shows busy professionals exactly how the marks can be used to make meaning clear and emphasize ideas. All the marks are covered, with hundreds of examples taken from today's workplace. From hyphens and semicolons to brackets and quotation marks...all the way to ellipses (and the eternal struggle between "that" and "which"), this book explains the many ways punctuation makes things plain.

Spis treści

CONTENTS

Introduction
Author's Note
Definitions

What You Need to Know First: 19 Principles
1. Punctuation can't rescue sense from nonsense.
2. The main reason to punctuate is to clarify your intent.
3. One of punctuation's tasks is to supply the various signals given by the voice.
4. In workplace writing, a sentence should yield its meaning instantly.
5. Punctuation should be invisible.
6. Punctuation follows the arrangement of words.
7. Punctuation indicates how ideas relate.
8. Punctuation suggests how much emphasis an idea deserves.
9. Punctuation slows the reading.
10. Don't count too much on context to make your meaning plain.
11. Know the difference between restrictive and non-restrictive expressions.
12. Respect the distinction between that and which.
13. When is punctuation optional?
14. Use the serial comma.
15. When do I separate adjectives with a comma?
16. Use the hyphen to clarify "improvised usage."
17. Sometimes, no matter how you punctuate, a reader is going to think it's wrong.
18. Feed your head.
19. When you see an odd usage, consider the source.

The Marks
- Apostrophe
- Brackets
- Colon
- Comma
- Dash
- Ellipsis
- Hyphen
- Parentheses
- Period
- Question Mark
- Quotation Marks
- Semicolon
- Slash
- Punctuating Common Sentence Structures

Appendix: How to List Ideas
Notes
Index

O autorze

RICHARD LAUCHMAN through his company The Lauchman Group, has been training professionals, in the area of writing, for over 25 years.