Zazou Marketing

Whether sending a sales letter, memo, newsletter or even an e-mail, a typo or poor grammar can damage your credibility. To avoid embarrassing mistakes, take your proofing to a higher level. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• If you’re providing a phone number or URL, dial the number or copy the URL into a web browser to make sure it’s right.
• Some words need to be capitalized, but with others it’s a style choice. It’s easy just to fall back into old habits, which may or may not be good ones. So, when you are writing, work at paying close attention to which words you are capitalizing and which words you are not. Then make sure you are consistent throughout your document. For instance, if you capitalized one person’s title, make sure you capitalize everyone’s titles. (Or don’t capitalize any of them!).
• This may seem like a no-brainer, but if you mention a brand name, spell it correctly. With the Internet at your fingertips, you have no excuse for not typing the name into your favorite search engine to check the spelling. You’ll be glad you did. It’s much easier than responding to a client or colleague who corrects you!

When you’re writing words like shake up, shape up or set up, do you ever wonder whether to use two words or combine them into one with a hyphen? Well, you’re not alone. Here’s a little rule to follow, use “shake up” when you need to use a verb and ”shake-up” as a noun or an adjective. Others that fit in a similar camp are:

Verb            Noun or Adjective
shape up        shape-up
speed up        speedup
set up            setup
sell out          sellout
stand in         stand-in
tie in              tie-in

Of course, the English language often makes no sense at all. For example, “second hand” is a noun, while “secondhand” is an adjective or adverb.

So, remember, next time you shape up your house, set up a garage sale and get rid of all of that secondhand clothing…

In this series, “Quick Tip”, we offer you linguistic rules of thumb. These explore grammar rules that will help you keep your business correspondence and marketing materials error-free. After all, you want your writing to reflect just how professional you are, don’t you?

So, here’s our first grammar tip for writing business correspondence and marketing materials:

The last time you wrote an e-mail asking a colleague to meet a deadline, you may have written, “Will you try and have that done on Monday?”

That’s fine for everyday relaxed conversation (and e-mails).

But for formal, precise prose, use the infinitive: try to (“Will you try to have that done on Monday?”).