Punctuation at Work (Simple Principles for Achieving Clarity and Good Style)

In the workplace, good punctuation is much more than a matter of correctness. It’s a matter of efficiency. Professionals who aren’t sure how to punctuate take more time than necessary to write, as they fret about the many inconsistent and contradictory rules they’ve picked up over the years. Good punctuation is also a matter of courtesy: In workplace writing, a sentence should yield its meaning instantly, but when punctuation is haphazard, readers need to work to understand – or guess at – the writer’s intent. Weak punctuation results in time-wasting confusion, questions about professionalism, and some times even serious and costly miscommunication. Without using the jargon of grammar — and providing 18 common sense principles to live by — Punctuation at Work shows busy professionals exactly how the marks can be used to make meaning clear and emphasize ideas. All the marks are covered, with hundreds of examples taken from today’s workplace. From hyphens and semicolons to brackets and quotation marks...all the way to ellipses (and the eternal struggle between “that” and “which”), this book explains the many ways punctuation makes things plain.