by Sharon Ernst | Nov 12, 2024 | Business Writing Skills, Proofreading and Editing
Although my oldest (who is in his 30s) disagrees with me about the importance of this because–he says–rules are changing, I am sticking with my principles and training for now. And I want to make sure we all know how to capitalize correctly. So let’s take a quick dive into the rules you need to know… How to capitalize correctly Although it might not happen too often, there might be times when you will write headlines, titles, headings, subheadings and the like as part of your writing at work–or you might be...
by Sharon Ernst | Nov 4, 2024 | Business Writing Skills
Let’s get to the point: Poor business writing skills are costing businesses billions of dollars. Businesses are paying this high price due to time wasted on many back-and-forth emails, brands damaged by careless content, poor communications that bog down projects, and more. Employees aren’t doing this on purpose! Employees want to be more effective and productive, but if they lack the skills, how can they? It’s in your best interests to help employees improve business writing skills. When you improve business writing skills The...
by Sharon Ernst | Oct 29, 2024 | Punctuation
OK, I admit it. I couldn’t have described a comma splice a month ago. I knew there was a mistake that needed fixing when I saw one, but I didn’t know what it was called. Now I do because I took copyediting classes from ACES. Let’s save you from that same embarrassment, shall we? A comma splice happens when you have two sentences running together as one. In grammar speak, it’s when you have to independent clauses together as one sentence. But I think it’s easier to understand if I say it’s two sentences. If what comes before the...
by Sharon Ernst | Oct 27, 2024 | Marketing Writing
A lot of marketing emails suck. I think that’s largely because email marketing is so easy to do…and that makes it so easy to do poorly. Even those emails sent out by big companies fall short. Why? Because too many of them are written from the marketer’s perspective, and that’s a turnoff for a prospect. So here’s help: If you’re a freelance copywriter or a marketer, read on for an example of a typical marketing email (names changed to protect the innocent) and my critique of it. This was an email that a client was using as the first...
by Sharon Ernst | Oct 24, 2024 | Business Writing Skills
I’ll admit it: I’ve yet to use ChatGPT. And I am still skeptical that it is going to fulfill all the marketing potential I see touted on LinkedIn. But I did just write an article for a client and was given AI-generated content as the starting point. And below is what I learned during my first experience. I pass this along to help out anyone else who is either a) handed an outline generated by ChatGPT as I was, or b) generating such outlines and giving them to writers to use. Because, regardless of my skepticism, I realize that AI...
