Month: January 2012

E-mail Memos Deserve Good Grammar too

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Don’t you love the freedom e-mail memos give you? You just tap away and press send, with no worries about good grammar. After all, who uses correct English in memos? It doesn’t really matter.

Or does it?

It is precisely because so few professionals follow rules of proper grammar in office memos that doing so will give you an advantage when bosses are ready to hand out raises, promotions and projects. Correct grammar will leave the impression that you are intelligent and careful. Your bosses will pick up on this and reward you.

But what if grammar isn’t your strong suit? Don’t worry. You don’t have to become Strunk or White overnight. Improving your writing requires only a little extra effort and time.

The first step requires you to dig up three or four old memos. Read through them and note up to three glaring grammar mistakes that you tend to made, such as ignoring punctuation, writing everything in small-case letters and spelling “tho” instead of “though”. Work on eliminating these mistakes from your memos. Don’t worry if you don’t know all the rules yet. Just do the best you can.

Once you have practiced avoiding the grammar mistakes from step 1, it’s time for step 2. Elicit the help from an online grammar check or the grammar check in your word processor. Check every online memo using these tools.

Finally, in step 3, review the corrected memos. If there are mistakes you do not understand, consult a grammar website or book and learn the rules. Pretty soon, you’ll write polished memos that will help you shine for your superiors.

Just how important IS good grammar anyway?

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You’d be surprised. Text Speak has taken over grammar as well as spelling. And it’s not as difficult as it seems to many. Nobody will mind if you can’t remember whether to say “Joey and I” rather than “Joey and me” in casual conversation. But in written communications, grammar is a first impression that lasts.

Your best bet – along with learning to use the language correctly – is to get a good online grammar checker. There are several available, but often people run a quick spell check and call it good. Don’t get us wrong; spelling is important too. But it does not compensate for grammar or punctuation either… because it’s too easy to pick the wrong homonym – for instance “your” in place of “you’re”. This is where grammar correcting software comes in. It knows all the strange little rules in the somewhat irregular language we call English.

There are plenty of them. In addition to homonyms and other spelling concerns, there are punctuation and capitalization issues, and simply good use of the language. Think about it. How many people know proper use of a semi-colon, or where to use that “Joey and I” example? Does one capitalize after an interjection? How about after that semi-colon… assuming the writer has used it correctly in the first place?

That’s why a grammar checker is a good idea… not so much for the big rules like common word order, but for all those little rules that most people cannot keep in their heads.