But Mr. Butts must have realized that a game as simple as that wouldn’t create the opportunities to grow and develop skill that an enduring product requires. (Let’s not discuss the merits of Mousetrap here – who knows why it’s still around.)

Experienced Scrabble players know that it’s not the words themselves that will win the game – how many letters they have managed to rid themselves of – but the compound interest provided by existing words on the board, and by the bonus spots that double and triple otherwise mediocre scores.

In this respect, Scrabble provides a model for all us aspiring writers and communicators. We approach a topic with a bagful of ideas that we need to mesh as productively as possible with existing published information. All communication is subject to the assumptions around its medium and by other past and current work with which readers will be familiar. This is an opportunity that we can choose to ignore, or to exploit.

There may be a few hot buttons that we can hit – the triple-word scores that will add extra interest; there are also explicit and implicit references we can make to connect to messages that are already out there, and borrow some of their value.

A fresh news site can win by providing stories that complete gaps left by mainstream media, perhaps by offering a new or local angle on national and international events. Choices of form, structure, style and vocabulary can bring to mind a fresh point of view borrowed from an unexpected genre. Writers can exploit the productive effects of intertextual references by engaging with and working against commentary and opinion that their readers are likely to recognize.

For example, framing an otherwise dry comment on writing within the context of a familiar board game might just work for some. That’s one key to winning an audience or a Scrabble game: use the leverage provided by the context you’re working in to add value to your message.

DITA and Hoarding

DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is IBM’s stab at producing standardized mechanisms for hoarding, or rather for “authoring, producing, and delivering technical information.” It needn’t be only technical information – the same principles can be applied to all sorts of written information, and the system is designed to be extensible. It basically refers to the process of storing information at a fairly granular level (individual information units or “topics”) along with meta-information that provides useful descriptions in case you want to re-use all or part of the information in future. It’s the foundation for content management and repurposing; other tools can then assemble and transform these topics as required for specific audiences, purposes, and output formats.

There are a number of related efforts, all focused on the task of labeling and organizing information. So by now we’re starting to understand what it takes to hoard all the information an organization produces, and build software to help us identify and retrieve it in future. In that regard – managing and retrieving our data – we’re better off than the hoarders who have so much stuff they couldn’t tell you what they have or where it is. But we do have one major problem in common with them; it’s hard to distinguish between information that’s likely to be useful, and information that we will likely never reference again.

Information Assets and Liabilities

Since storage is cheap, it’s tempting to keep all the information we produce. Every document, internal and external, every memo, e-mail message, meeting agenda and minutes – everything. And this gets more attractive as we develop DITA-related tools that help streamline the cataloguing and storing process. But this mass warehousing approach suggests that all our information is either of equal value, or of equally unknown value. And more is not always better, especially when it comes to rapid search and retrieval of information in future.

One thing DITA, and other information typing technologies cannot help with is the ranking of information in terms of likely relevance. This is likely to be specific to your particular topic domain or specialization, but in order to avoid hoarding and amassing too much undifferentiated information we need some standardization in the way we approach assigning value to topics.

Imputed versus Apparent Relevance

We can impute value, which pretty much means make a good guess when we produce information as to whether we might reference it again in future. Writers could do this based on the feedback they received from subject matter experts (SMEs) when they gathered the information; they can get a pretty good feel for how important or controversial topics were, and how much interest there was in them. They can also use reviewer comments to distinguish the hot topics from the less interesting ones, and assign the more debated information a higher relevance.

There’s also the apparent value of information, which is well-known to those engaged in search engine optimization. This is indicated by how well linked the information is – how much other information references it or is referenced by it. Topics at the center of a web are more likely to have lasting relevance than those that attract less attention, and we can imagine automated tools to track and assign a dynamic relevance quota that represents this more measurable or apparent value of a topic.

Based on their likely relevance, then, topics can also be assigned a “time to live” number that determines how slowly or rapidly their likely relevance expires. This value ticks down to zero (or “irrelevant”) for as long as the topic remains untouched; at that point it might be removed from the system.

What’s the Payback?

The payback for DITA and similar technologies is clear. If we don’t learn from past topics, decisions, meetings, and e-mail threads – then we are doomed to repeat them. Building a library of tried and tested, edited and legalized information topics has clear value. But we need to develop a hierarchy of information such that the likely most valuable is the most thoroughly tagged and categorized, and information that proves to be of little use can be quietly and efficiently sent to a “stack” or jettisoned for good. Only by doing this can we most efficiently use the time and expertise of writers, editors, and program managers who are tasked with maintaining that core company asset – information.

More Information

This topic, and more, is further discussed in an upcoming issue of rewrite, where we provide short, immediately useful and engaging articles relating to obtaining, organizing, transforming and producing written information. Take a look and see if a subscription might be useful for you; in the meantime, thanks for your interest in the readytext blog.

But that doesn’t let the writer or editor off the hook with respect to producing clean, error-free writing. In particular, writing that’s free of those annoying errors that crop up at the last minute, just before publication, and often go unnoticed as the momentum to publish takes hold.

So here’s a quick roundup of the most common issues that, if we’re not careful, appear only after we’ve released the finished work. Check for these during final edit, and you can prevent that sinking feeling that happens when readers report a miss-spelled running header, or a table caption that somehow got pushed to the following page.

First, check the pages for the big picture. Often, you can spot formatting errors more easily when you step back a little and view the pages two-up. Check for missing headers and footers, wrong page numbers, and unusual looking gaps and white space. Make sure fonts look consistent, and paragraphs aren’t orphaned across page breaks (leaving just a few words at the top of a new page before a new paragraph). Do diagrams and tables sit correctly with regard to associated text? A common error is for changes in body text to push or pull a table across a page break, resulting in a table header with just one row beneath it, or illustrations with text flowed around them that now doesn’t flow quite as well.

Next, scan a little closer for missing or extra spaces between words, before and after punctuation, and even between paragraphs. When late additions or deletions are made, these sorts of errors are likely. Check that where possible diagrams, tables and figures are on the same page as the text that references them, and that associated captions are correctly attached. Check all numbering – for pages, headers, tables and so on — for consistency, sequence, and integrity.

Search for things like ‘above’ and ‘below’. These terms shouldn’t be used to refer to the relative location of items in the text, and editors generally remove them; but where they are, make sure things haven’t been subsequently moved. Search for references to numbers; often, the number of items of one sort or another – list entries, subsections, even table entries – changes, but the text referring to them doesn’t (”There are five reasons to drink tea” followed by four reasons, for example).

It’s probably best to take the time to double-check any hyperlinks, both inside and outside the document. There’s nothing like dead links inside an online document to undermine its relevance and authority, and if a link is going to go away it will do so at the last minute, you can be sure. That includes those internal links in the table of contents, if necessary (you already checked that the page numbers in the TOC are correct, right? Forgetting to regenerate TOCs is a classic mistake made under stress).

A final check that headings remain parallel is useful. For example, someone added a new section and now six headings are imperatives (such as “Boil the Water”, “Measure the Tea”) and one contains a participle (”Warming the Pot”).

Finally, it’s surprisingly easy in a well-reviewed and heavily edited document to end up with chunks of material – paragraphs and more – that at the last minute either disappear, or are duplicated. Blame cut and paste. This is one of the few errors that a quick scan is more likely to catch than a detailed read-through.

More on this in future, and in particular how common writing tools often seem to conspire to make the late introduction of these sorts of errors almost automatic. We will also look at strategies to avoid having to deal with disgruntled customers who pushed for hasty production and skipped edit rounds, because they didn’t feel error-free text was important until they saw the published article.

Novelists report that fictional characters and situations seem to independently take on threads of meaning that the author recognizes, follows, and explores. Non-fiction writers can find themselves in similar situations, when structural demands of the text, contextual resonances, and the unpredictable situations in which the text will be interpreted can lead to a sense that meaning is being corralled rather than created.

A related question is whether, given the tendency of texts, presentations and written communication in general to escape the control of the author, we can identify what it is that authors are doing when they produce “good” or even “great” writing. Because if teachers can’t figure that out, they can’t really coach others to be great writers.

Stephen King reckons it’s not possible to teach anyone to be a great writer. You can become a good writer, but his claim is that great writers – like people who are great at almost anything – have an aptitude at the outset that you either have or you don’t.

So it may be like great painting, or great musicianship; we know it when we see it or hear it, and we can go to great lengths to explain why we think one work stands out above the rest, but most of us don’t really expect to learn to write like Hemingway, paint like Van Gogh, or compose our own fifth symphony. But we do, often, feel compelled to ask why it reads well, looks interesting, or sounds so moving.

Common advice to would-be writers is to read as much as possible, presumably choosing among texts that are already judged well-written. And this we can all do, in the hope that some of that technique will rub off. In many endeavors, when we hang around successful people we raise the chances that we, too, will be successful; perhaps the same principal applies here.

So if Stephen King is right, what can a writing newsletter have to offer and what kind of articles can you expect in rewrite, which claims to deal with the “techniques and technologies of effective written communication”?

We do include a few purely pragmatic tips to help identify common stumbling-blocks that prevent writing from working for us. More in-depth articles look at practical tools such as single-sourcing and content management support systems that increase the efficiency of individual writers and writing teams.

But we also follow the idea of summoning success by standing closer to someone successful. We look at greater length at what makes great writing work; why it’s effective, why it’s a pleasure to read, and what makes it unusual. Why do some texts seem to carry us forward and propel us toward their messages, while others are like pushing rocks uphill? What features of the language are at play when writing achieves something remarkable, or what techniques make one presentation memorable while another is forgettable? By reading, by reflecting on what we read and by analyzing it when it strikes us that something unusual is happening, we may learn to at least better recognize the good and the bad, the resonant and the unreadable in our own work.

The intention is that in the process we may not become great writers, but we may become better writers and we may just have more fun writing.

This month in rewrite we look at how to make the most of your time with SMEs, and how to avoid some of the most common pitfalls when your work with them. In the meantime, here’s a few of the takeaways.

Pre-SME

Find out what your project is about. Sounds pretty basic, but until you’ve nailed down what you’re writing about, it’s hard to identify the best people to help you with it. You may need to review an outline with whoever is sponsoring or signing off on your work, before you can be sure where the required expertise lies.

As you identify SMEs, try to get a feel for how likely it is you will be able to get what you need from them within your schedule. An unavailable expert is no use, and an expert in another time zone may be less useful than someone down the hall. You may prefer experts who have bought into the project, or whose managers are committed to it, over those who are unaware or who work in a separate organization.

You perhaps don’t need all your experts on day 1 for draft 1. Line up SMEs with dates and drafts, and sequence them if necessary if you know you will need information from one before you are ready to interview another.

Pay special attention to the message inviting them to speak with you. Make clear why you need them, when you need them, and why it’s important that they give you their time. It’s important to be flexible, but you should bear in mind your schedule and respect your own as well as the SMEs’ time. Always allow a potential SME who cannot meet your schedule to nominate someone else they feel is equipped to contribute.

SME

In general, SME interviews should be efficient. That means you end up with information you can use in the form of notes you can decipher, and the SME has given you information you couldn’t reasonably or easily have got elsewhere. They are experts, so they don’t enjoy spending time discussing topics outside their area of expertise, especially if their schedule is already tight. Interviews usually go well when you ask intelligent questions for which you are adequately prepared, so you can move on without spending too much time seeking clarifications.

However, don’t waste time taking notes on points you really don’t understand. Worse than asking for clarification during the interview, is having to come back to the SME later to ask the same questions again because you clearly didn’t follow the first time around.

Awkward interviews – when the SME is uninterested, distracted or otherwise unhelpful – can always be rescheduled. Sometimes the suggestion that they be rescheduled is enough to bring them back on track. If you know the SME finds it hard to blank out uninterrupted time for you, it may be best to schedule the interview somewhere you won’t be disturbed – a meeting room, your office, even the cafeteria or coffee bar – and avoid the SME’s office.

Post-SME

Follow up with thank you and next steps – especially if the SME will be on an interview loop later in the project. If possible, make sure everyone involved in the project sees progress; publish a timeline with major milestones checked off as they are achieved. Give everyone a sense that the project has momentum, that they’re all onboard and it’s too late to step off. Be prepared to be diplomatic when you have conflicting information from SMEs, or when their review comments appear to contradict one another. You must ensure you understand and can articulate your understanding of all arguments before you pit them against one another and seek resolution. The ego in the Expert part of SME can be easily bruised, and maintaining a good professional relationship with SMEs is important, especially if you feel you may be speaking with them again in future projects.

More Information

This topic, and more, is further discussed in the May 2010 issue of rewrite, where we provide short, immediately useful and engaging articles relating to obtaining, organizing, transforming and producing written information. Take a look and see if a subscription might be useful for you; in the meantime, thanks for your interest in the readytext blog.

Slides as Notes

Here’s a slide that might be designed to tell the audience about a new line of perfume.

Speaker notes: Designed for women. Will be called ‘rouge’. Reasonably exclusive. Testers say “hot”, “fiery”, “sophisticated”, “liberating”. Is one of our more expensive.

Many of us have endured countless tedious and forgettable slides like this. The speaker pushes the button, reads the slide, coughs, and shuffles on to the next one. The slides proceed more as a script or reference material that we should print out for later, and in fact often reappear, bound and filed, as ‘handouts’. This kind of slide is more like a précis than a presentation.

Slides as Representations

Of course, it’s fine for the speaker to say what’s on that slide. The bad part is that it’s also on the slide. Slides should illustrate or represent rather than slavishly repeat the messages of the presentation.

Dick Hardt, a Web identity specialist who is unafraid to use his remarkable name to help sell his message, has produced some great presentations. Who Is the Dick on My Site? (http://identity20.com/media/ETECH_2006) showcases his method of using slides to punctuate, not repeat, his words. His presentation is not sequential or rigidly structured (sequences of key slide, sub-slides); he builds his arguments, but the slides dart in and out of the discussion, highlighting, grabbing attention and sometimes intentionally and ironically undermining. Key words and phrases flash on the screen as he talks, adding pace and punch to his pretty much continuous speech. Pictures and graphics are repeated at various stages to reinforce fundamental points and create a sense of familiarity and closure. The applause at the end of his presentations is genuine, the audience sensing that they have covered a lot of ground, learned a lot, and will remember it long after the Danish pastries are gone and the coffee is cold.

And that’s the main point here: his presentations are memorable – or, rather, the presentation itself makes his arguments memorable and tie otherwise arcane issues to memorable images and events.

Slides as Metaphors

Dick’s slides, though, are still chiefly direct representations, in one form or another, of what he is saying. They’re by no means straight scripts, but they are literal in that they refer directly to one or more points in his speech. He also uses a less direct approach to reinforcing his words.

Slides can also be memorable when they are metaphorical, rather than literal. They provide images that are separate from the speaker’s words and they don’t refer directly to them at all. Instead, slides provide figural glue that helps the messaging to stick in the audience’s mind.

Our perfume presenter plodded through the inevitably impersonal features of the new perfume, and listed those features on a slide that doesn’t help tie them to the product or lend the new perfume any sort of unique identity. We could be talking about any perfume, really. How much more effective is an image to which the audience can associate on the one hand the stated features, and on the other, this specific product:

Speaker notes: Designed for women. Will be called ‘rouge’. Reasonably exclusive. Testers say “hot”, “fiery”, “sophisticated”, “liberating”. Is one of our more expensive.

In this way the speaker is able to use the power of metaphor to link dissimilar objects (product and message) within an image, made memorable by the overall experience.

Presentations as Commercials

Of course, the “product” here is whatever concept or argument that the presenter is trying to make. And the image could be anything that fires the imagination and adds stickiness to the messaging. This is a process familiar to people who make commercials, where they are intending to make as big an impression as possible, as immediately as possible. It’s even hard to imagine a commercial designed along the lines of the average corporate PowerPoint slide. Commercials don’t expect their audience to remember a series of facts, and they seldom punish us with bulleted lists. They engage us, they give us something to figure out, and they enable us to take part in creating a memorable experience by setting up the conditions for this to happen.

What do we achieve when we take on these techniques in our presentations? We exchange mere information redundancy for message reinforcement. Our audience gets an experience rather than a lecture, and instead of dying in their ring binders our messaging lives in their imagination.

Maybe we should treat presentations more like commercials than – well – presentations. We have a short time to make a lasting impression, and we need to focus on making our messaging stick. More on building effective presentations in the May 2010 edition of the rewrite newsletter.

The commercials give no real detail about Apple’s products or services. Instead, they promote a long-term message that Apple is good people, that we can feel good about keeping their company, and that the quality of their products goes without question. In contrast, their competitor has only the questionable quality of its products to offer, and those flaws are embodied by an actor who happens to remind us of Microsoft’s most famous employee. In this way one corporation becomes a flawed character we wouldn’t want to associate or be associated with, while we poke fun and share jokes about it with our friend, the other.

Keeping the Brand ‘In Mind’

Raw information, technical detail, rational argument – no matter how well reasoned and clearly presented – is by nature anonymous, characterless, utilitarian, orphaned from any source, and ultimately forgettable. It doesn’t help keep a company or its brand ‘in mind’.

What does help is when we think of Corporations as people, not entities. One relatively recent way to achieve this is to embrace social networking (Facebook, Twitter) in order to win the loyalty and forgiveness that’s reserved for our friends, and avoid the suspicion and distrust that may accompany an approach by strangers.

But expensive and infrequent commercials, perky tweets, or the camaraderie of a Facebook fan are not the only means available to add personality, stay in mind, and convince customers that they’re in good company.

Voicing Communications

Convention sometimes holds that the best writing model for conveying information is transparent, opinionless and apparently authorless – the perfect journalistic style.

I would argue instead that effective and memorable corporate communications, and not only external ones, should feature a specific corporate identity or ‘voice’. Key to developing and maintaining voice is making the notion of the character of the source, and the emotional appeal of the message, central principles. This not only helps customers ‘read’ information, it makes their task easier, makes the company memorable, and helps associate that positive experience with a brand.

Personality and Consistency

The danger for a company is that it writes itself or its brand out of its communications, when its goal should be the opposite: to be recognized and recalled whenever it communicates.

Among those things that help determine a recognizable voice in corporate communications are:

• Facts tempered with experiences. In a feature-list for a new notebook computer, it’s common to find a LED-backlit 1920*1080 pixel display. But in Apple’s case, the display is variously brilliant, stunning, beautiful, and ideal for watching HD movies. These are terms that may then come to mind when we see the computer or think of the brand.
• Elements imported from a conversational style. Writing that ’speaks’ to customers probably isn’t written by a lawyer, so communications should be more like conversations than legalese.
• Consistency. You may not recognize a person who looks completely different every time you see them. Publications need consistent cues too if readers are to recognize a common and unifying authorial voice.
  • Repetition of form, structure, and vocabulary helps too.
• Resisted temptation to let the subject dictate the style. Complex subjects don’t need tougher prose; technical detail is not by necessity dry and anonymous.
• Efficiency sacrificed for readability. Casual chit-chat may be one of the least efficient means of communication; mathematical notation one of the most dense. Good communications aim for somewhere in between!
  • Fifteen pages of lists with a half dozen supporting tables may be ‘optimal’, but context-setting and a paragraph here and there reminds us that we’re in a conversation with the author, collaborating in the writing and reading process, and not merely taking instruction from a robot.
• Strong editing, especially where communications are compiled from multiple sources.
  • Editing that refuses to allow topic complexity or audience specialization to excuse bland or incoherent voice.
• Strong sense of “I” and “You”. Strong characters are self-aware, and strong writing is positive, active, and unafraid to identify who is speaking and who else is in the conversation. Not “The manufacturer will replace a defective widget”, but “Widgetmaster will promptly replace your failed widget.”

When Deadpan Rational is Still Best

Of course, there are situations where a controlled style and vocabulary may be required. Air traffic control communications, drug administration instructions, and legal contracts are specifically intended to assume a single voice common to their specialized domain. These documents do not conjure the image of recognized and trusted friend. They are not intended to do anything but convey information as formally and accurately as the language will allow, and so use rigid conventions and contexts that must be understood before they are read.

But don’t write like that unless you have to.

Try to give readers of all types a memorable experience by developing a recognizable and repeatable authorial voice. Put the corp, not the corpse, back into corporate communications.

This article discusses corporate approaches to personalizing communications. But the same principles apply to individuals who are writing for colleagues, staff or managers within their organizations. There will be more on voice and narrative in non-fiction writing in an upcoming edition of the rewrite newsletter.

Top Five Convenience Requirements for Product Information

Let’s face it: you don’t read most product documentation, because most product documentation is inconvenient. In order of convenience, you probably want:

1. To already know everything you need to know
2. To have immediate answers to your questions
3. To have readily available information on the thing you need to learn about
4. To know that the information you need is available if only you can find it
5. To be able to give up on whatever you are trying to do and feel ok about that

Know Everything you Need to Know

A great goal for every product, and certainly the claim of many. This happens sometimes, but usually with items like egg timers, pencils and batteries – items that we really don’t expect to have difficulty figuring out. Some still believe it of Apple computers.

Immediate Answers to your Questions

Instruction manuals don’t cut it since they’re not immediate enough or we assume it will take too long to find our simple answer using the index, table of contents or whatever. Immediate answers come from the online forum, or the expert standing at your side. Again, Apple computer use this technique by way of a search feature that is intended to present the most likely useful answers to your queries. For printed documents, ‘Quick Start’ and ‘Troubleshooting’ sheets (often colorful and glossy) are supposed to anticipate your issues with in-your-face instructions in bold type and appealing graphics. But they usually fall short sooner or later.

Readily Available Information on the Thing you Need to Learn About

This is the equivalent of the shelf-full of manuals that used to come with computers, or the substantial book that comes with a new car. The assumption here is that you may actually read these books, perhaps even from start to finish, in order to inwardly digest all the manufacturer feels you should know about the product. In fact you tend to turn to these as a last resort, relying on the probability that such a huge amount of information cannot possibly exclude the one thing you need to know.

The Information you Need is Available if Only you can Find it

You know the feeling. You have such an obvious task that you know there must be a way your new widget can do it, but after a number of unsuccessful guesses you need to find some help somewhere. But no need to give up – after all, the widget manufacturer wouldn’t be in business if the answer wasn’t there somewhere. Maybe try once more online…

Give Up on Whatever you are Trying to Do and Feel OK About That

This is the least convenient aspect of owning your new widget, and perhaps the final chance it has for you to keep it despite the issue, rather than return it and write off the whole experience. The marketers’ equivalent to the sin of despair, they have invoked in you the sin of indifference. They have produced a product whose feature is so hard to figure out, so frustratingly obvious yet inaccessible, that the consumer has simply lost interest and doesn’t care enough to complain. Classic example: programmable VCRs on which the only functions anyone uses are ‘play’ and ’stop’.

Why This Needs Fixing

As a manufacturer you are keen to bond with your consumers. You want to own a productive and long-term relationship with them. And nothing threatens that bond more than consumers who turn to strangers for information about your products, who are frustrated by them, or who are driven to indifference about you and your brand.

In the upcoming rewrite newsletter we will be looking at how a blend of the first three conveniences seems to be optimal for consumers and manufacturers alike, why manufacturers need to own that blend rather than relinquish it to third-parties, and the steps we can take to achieve it in the most simple and the most complex product documentation scenarios.

In the meantime, for fun here are two examples of self-describing products.

The Self-Disclosing Appliance

This is a knob. If you play with it you’ll find you can turn it and push it. You plug it into your computer and see what it does. It requires little or no documentation, and it’s an extreme manifestation of self-disclosure. Trouble is, it’s correspondingly orphaned from its producer (perhaps that’s why the manufacturer’s name alone is stamped so boldly on it).

It looks like it dropped out of the sky.

The Self-Documenting Appliance

Oh dear. A button for every function, and a label for every button. We know it’s a ‘Bedroom Cordless Telephone/Clock Radio’ because it says so, but with all those buttons we’re sure it must wash the dishes too.

If only we could figure out how to set the alarm.

You know there’s a rule about parentheses and period placement, but you’re unsure about it. The result is you have to make a decision about this and other punctuation issues every time you’re faced with them. It slows you down, interrupts your thought, wastes your effort, and makes it hard to write consistently.

Our Top Ten List

Here’s a top ten list for punctuation problems (by no means exhaustive, but familiar to many of us).

• Apostrophe. For the possessive of it, make sure you remove its apostrophe. But it’s a requirement for it is or it has. Dave Barry famously advised that an apostrophe is used to indicate that an s is coming; this is true in the case of pluralized words, where the s may otherwise be confused with the word itself (no if’s about it).
• Capitals. Capitalize sentences and quoted sentences; as our editor told us, “Remember that rule!” Capitalize proper nouns such as people, places and things. Don’t capitalize common nouns which are generic classes of things. Microsoft produces software called Office from its Redmond office. That reminds me; when you refer to something like Microsoft Online Services, follow the inventor or owner’s capitalization. As a general rule, use capitals in headers except for logistical words like articles (a, the) conjunctions (if, and) and prepositions (in, for).
• Dashes, Colons, and Semicolons. Dashes are almost as powerful as highlight pens, and so should generally be used just as sparingly. They can emphasize small things – words – or entire phrases – which might otherwise be overlooked. They can also mark a switch of emphasis – and I mean this most sincerely – or additional information – often too important to be enclosed in parentheses.
  • Colons are much more straightforward: they mark examples, explanations such as this, and lists. The important thing is not to combine them with words or phrases that already provide that function, such as: this.
  • Finally there are semicolons, which also link independent phrases or clauses, but less dramatically. Sometimes you can link two short sentences with a semicolon; this creates a single sentence that has a better rhythm. If your writing seems too staccato, maybe you need more semicolons.
• Hyphenation. Simple rule: if in doubt, leave it out. Hyphens are often a historical waypoint in the migration of two words to one (for example: touch line, touch-line, touchline). So if you’re unsure then you’re better off ahead of this game rather than behind it; go straight to a single word. Hyphens are often introduced in an adjectival/adverbial role, where they modify a thing or an action. In these cases, eventually, the modifier and the modified are merged (I know I risk pigeonholing here).
• Inside or Outside? In general, punctuation accompanies the material quoted or parenthesized. Keep punctuation marks inside quotes and parentheses where it’s part of the quoted material. If the quoted or parenthesized material is inside a sentence, or at the end of a sentence, or if the punctuation is a colon or semicolon, place it outside the quotes or parentheses instead. “Why should I?” you may ask (because it’s a pain to remember all these rules).
• Italics. Use italics to indicate you’re referring, rather than directly using, words or names; for example, the word italics in this sentence or Keats’ use of the word fibble.
• Numbers. Spell them out at the beginning of sentences, or if that’s too unwieldy, move them inside the sentence and use figures. Rule of thumb: within text, use figures for numbers above 99. Spell out ordinals (ranked numbers) like first, sixth, eleventh instead of using figures. Spell out percentages and use the word percent. Use all figures inside tables.
• Quotation. Quote titles of short works, articles, episodes, and blog entries like “Common Punctuation Problems”, but use italics to refer to major works, series titles or collections such as readytext’s rewrite newsletter or Lambs Tales from Shakespeare.
• Serial Commas. The most unassuming of punctuation marks, commas try to quietly order things without drawing any attention. In a list of three or more items, use a comma after each of them to help keep them separate. “My parents, Mother Theresa, and the Pope” is a common example that always raises a smile, a smirk, or a complaint.
• Spaces. Notorious for evading automated grammar checking, spaces should be avoided whenever you have to think about it, and double spaces are almost invariably optional. In general, don’t use spaces before punctuation marks of any sort (apart from parentheses and quotes). You don’t need a second space after a period.

The Importance of Being Consistent

A good rule is that consistency is as important as accuracy. Even if they’re not familiar with the rules, readers are surprisingly good at picking up inconsistency in punctuation, and this can lead to a sense of uncertainty or lack of authority in your writing. And even if you make a mistake, if it’s consistently made then it’s easier for your editor to correct.

So pick a rule and stick with it until your editor successfully argues you out of it. And let me know when you spot the punctuation errors in this blog!