It’s the holiday season, and although Santa Claus is commonly seen at this time, this post is about a different kind of “claus”—an independent clause—and an error I commonly see. If two independent clauses are joined by a coordinating conjunction, a comma is needed before the conjunction. What’s an independent clause? It’s a group of […]

A client recently asked me to “do some surgery” on an important, lengthy business letter. “Do whatever you can to fix it and make it good,” he said. He was willing to put the fate of a specific professional goal in my hands. And I was confident that I could give him what he needed. […]

Long ago, in a university dorm room built for one, lived two freshmen girls. In the tiny room one Sunday afternoon in late fall of 1995, a mix tape played on a stereo that sat atop a dresser. Within reach, a stack of VHS tapes rested on a shelf below a TV/VCR, next to a […]

Do you think correct spelling is no longer important because we have technology that can spell for us and because “text speak” is common? Technology such as autocorrection may be making misspellings common, but that doesn’t change the reality that poor spelling is powerful in terms of the way people judge you. Correct spelling is […]

“Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”      —Henry James The quote above may be from a British writer, but because I’m writing this blog post in American English, I’ve used double quotation marks to enclose it. Some people think using single or double […]