10 Tips About Basic Writing Competency

Posted: January 19, 2013

[caption id="attachment_11132" align="alignright" width="278"]© almagami - Fotolia.com[/caption]Some of the rules you've used for formatting and styling your writing may have changed over the years. Learn what you need to do, and to avoid, to look like a professional and an up-to-date writer.

Here are ten areas to be sure to attend to if you wish to be taken seriously as a professional writer.

Formatting
1. Do not enter two letter spaces between sentences. Use of two spaces is an obsolete convention based on typewriter technology and will mark you as out of touch. If editors or other potential employers or clients notice that you don’t know this simple fact, they may be skeptical about your writing skills before you’ve had a chance to impress them.

2. Take care that paragraphs are of varying reasonable lengths. Unusually short or long paragraphs are appropriate in moderation, but allowing a series of choppy paragraphs or laboriously long ones to remain in a final draft is unprofessional.

3. If you’re submitting a manuscript or other content for publication, do not format it with various fonts and other style features. Editors want to read good writing, not enjoy aesthetically pleasing (or not) manuscripts; efforts to prettify a file are a distraction.

Style
4. Do not, in résumés or in other text, get carried away with capitalization. You didn’t earn a Master’s Degree; you earned a master’s degree. You didn’t study Biology; you studied biology. You weren’t Project Manager; you were project manager. (Search the Daily Writing Tips website for “capitalization” to find numerous articles on the subject.)

5. Become familiar with the rules for styling numbers, and apply them rationally.

6. Know the principles of punctuation, especially regarding consistency in insertion or omission of the serial comma, avoidance of the comma splice, and use of the semicolon. (Search the Daily Writing Tips website for “punctuation” to find numerous articles on the subject.) And if you write in American English and you routinely place a period after the closing quotation mark at the end of a sentence rather than before it, go back to square one and try again.

Read the entire article 10 Tips About Basic Writing Competency at DailyWritingTips.