Business blogs

Blogs are big for business. Firstly, they improve SEO (search engine optimisation) for a website through the constant addition of new, relevant, keyword-rich copy. Secondly, they are a great way to let customers/clients know a bit more about you and your business.

Whichever style of blog you choose to go with - formal, professional, educative, news-packed, article-driven, diary-style, chatty - if it's a business blog, you need to pay attention to the standard of writing. Your potential and current clients will be judging you on each post you make, so if those posts are poorly written and riddled with typos and grammatical mistakes, you're going to do more harm than good.

If you're serious about writing a regular blog for your company, and you're prepared to admit you aren't a strong, accurate writer, you may want to think about brushing up your writing and proofreading skills. Or hiring a proofreader, copy-editor or copywriter for your blogging, which is becoming more common.

Like they say, If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing properly.

Semi-colons and colons

Many people get muddled over the usage of colons (:) and semi-colons (;).

In simple terms, a colon is an introducer. It points forward and introduces:

• a list (as above)
• an extended quotation or sometimes direct speech. Mr Jones says: “I’m delighted by this promotion. . .”
• an explanation or amplification of the preceding part of the sentence. There was only one thing to do: run.

The last use is the one most people struggle with. Basically, a colon is a rather dramatic punctuation mark: it makes the reader pause and theatrically announces something to come which will add new information to the part of the sentence before the colon. Usually, the part of the sentence before the colon is a complete sentence in itself, and the colon could be replaced with words like namely, that is, for example, for instance, because and therefore.

The semi-colon is a little like a comma but with special powers. It has two main jobs:

• It can join two separate sentences that are closely related. It was his first job as a salesman; before this, he had been a teacher.
• It can help divide up long and complicated lists that may otherwise be confusing. I ordered a prawn cocktail, not with salad; a steak, chips and peas; an ice cream sundae without nuts; and a pitcher of beer.

Correct usage of both colons and semi-colons is important for good, accurate writing. These days, some writers view them as old-fashioned and abandon them altogether, littering the page with dashes and comma splices instead. If you want to be taken seriously in any form of communication, I advise sticking with the rules of English grammar.

Lose and loose

These two words are commonly muddled , and often writers have no idea that they are using them incorrectly.

Lose means to misplace something. Loose is the opposite of tight.

So the following are not correct:
Dropping my handbag made me loose my place in the queue.
I can't afford to loose this job.
The Hawaiian shirt was loud, lose and lousy.

How much easier it would be if they were spelled looze and loose, but that's the English language for you.

Common mistakes in writing

They rear their ugly heads daily as I proofread and edit, worming their way into document after document as if sticking a tongue out at me goading, Catch me if you can. And I do catch them, day after day - mistakes I find so often they jump out at me from the page as if 3D.

Here's my top five:

1. Comma splices: It's amazing how many writers join two sentences together with a comma, and rather alarming how prevalent this has become in published books (take a look at this weekend's HP finale).
2. Missing/incorrect apostrophes: Did you notice the apostrophe in weekend's above? Many seem to feel the apostrophe is either optional, or something to plonk anywhere in the vicinity of the word in question.
3. Random capitals: I spend an impressive amount of my day decapitalising words.
4. Inconsistent styling: It's thirteen miles to London, but three lines later it's 15 days until Christmas.
5. Spellchecked nonsense: Just because that word is spelled correctly, doesn't mean it's the right word. This morning I found the following while proofreading a serious article on a church: The chap is a plaice for queer time (The chapel is a place for quiet time).

The spice of life

Children's fiction to consumer-enticing web copy; 'how to' guide to publicity-grabbing news release; seo article to action thriller; copywriting and critiquing to copy-editing and proofreading: variety is one of the things I enjoy most about Perfectly Write.

In the last two weeks I've written articles on health and safety and barge racing; proofread books on John F Kennedy, Adidas, Sherlock Holmes, and a bridal magazine; copy-edited material on educational reform, educational resources and models for website redesign; and critiqued a website.

Next week I will be copy-editing and copywriting material for internal and external corporate magazines; rewriting a 30-page website to ensure search engine optimisation; proofreading a cookbook for diabetics, and anything else that lands in my inbox. It's an eclectic mix, but it keeps me on my toes.

Potty about Harry

The clock is ticking, counting down the days, hours, minutes to the release of the grand finale of Harry Potter. It's with a sense of mounting excitement yet knowledge of a sad finality to come that I count down.

With the end of the series so close now, it seems an appropriate time to marvel at the phenomenal success of these books. Thanks to HP, reading has, at times, been the new TV. When I worked at a school it was often a struggle to get many kids interested in reading, but get them into these books and they were away - never mind the fact it took them a school term to get through each one.

I am an unashamed fan. You know those columns in magazines/papers/websites where they ask such-and-such celebrity/professional what they're reading, and most of them list a wonderful assortment of serious, weighty, wordy (boring?) 'literature'? I'd quite happily shout about HP (and many other children's books).

I dare say Saturday evening I shall be moping about like a child who's unwrapped her Christmas presents, played with them all, eaten turkey until she's bursting and watched every film on TV, and is now mourning the loss of anticipation, suspense and excitement. Until then, I watch the hands on the clock.

Random capitals - the Most Common misTake

I can't even begin to tell you how many times each day I hit 'shift + F3' in Word to decapitalise a word/phrase. Many, many writers out there are trigger happy on that shift key as they type. In my years as a proofreader, capitalisation is the issue I come up against more frequently as I work with authors' texts - yes, far more so than spelling and just that bit more than punctuation. Today I've been marking up proofs, and I'd estimate 75 per cent of my changes are to decapitalise words - my hand is cramped from scribbling the BS 5261 proofreading symbol for 'make lower case'.

Perhaps it's that feeling of power as a writer that does it, to make Some Word Seem Very Important. The downside to a penchant for caps lock, however, is that overuse of upper case is off-putting to a reader, and very often grammatically incorrect.

My advice to the writers I work with is simple: Please do use a capital letter for the first word in a sentence and the name of your hometown, but if you're straying into the realms of 'capitals because I feel like it rather than because they are actually required', take a step back and resist. Your writing will be much stronger as a result, and my F3 key may just survive a few more years of proofreading.

If you need to brush up on the rules, dip into a grammar guide. I recommend Oxford guides, and also English Grammar For Dummies (I edited it, so can guarantee it's a great oracle for things like this).