How many spaces should be included after end punctuation such as a period (full stop), exclamation point, and question mark?
One.
It's true. Believe me. Despite what your teachers taught and typewriters required in decades past, the number of spaces after end punctuation--and after a colon--is one.
Wanting to be...
As we rapidly generate documents and email, we rely more and more on Microsoft's grammar and spelling checker. But you may not be getting as much as you could from that tool. For example:
Does your grammar checker catch passive-verb sentences, such as "The meter should be read"?
The active-verb form...
Mistakes. Mistakes. Mistakes. We all make them, even when we think we have proofread our documents.
Some mistakes are worse than others:
Written: The rent will be $200 per month. Intended: The rent increase will be $200 per month.
Written: You have a credit of $2,500. Intended: You have...
Never accept a grammar- and spell-check as foolproof.
Last week I was once again reminded of the limits of proofreading software. In a business writing class, participants were sharing the documents they had just written, when we discovered these grammar- and spell-check misses:
"between you and I" (change...
Question: What do "human begins" and "human beings" have in common?
Answer: Spell-check accepts both of them.
So in a recent post, I talked about the importance of writing as human begins. Hmmm, that could be fascinating! Perhaps on stone tablets?
However, since I intended "writing as human beings," I...
