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7 Chapter 7: Revising and Presenting Your Writing

“I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.”

—James A. Michener

“Half my life is an act of revision.”

—John Irving

Opening Case Study: The Seventy-Two Hour Review

Oluchi Hjarnsdottir-Petrov found the dangling modifier at 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday, sitting at her kitchen table with an 87-page PDF open on her laptop and a mug of cold rooibos at her elbow. She read the sentence three times before her stomach dropped.

“After completing a full chain-of-custody audit, the prevalence estimates appear reliable.”

Grammatically, the sentence was a mess. The prevalence estimates hadn’t completed anything. A reader could technically argue that the estimates themselves had done the audit—which was absurd—but worse, a hostile reader could argue the lab hadn’t actually done the audit at all. The sentence left it floating. And in a report that was going to land on a state wildlife agency desk in less than seventy-two hours, floating wasn’t good enough.

Oluchi was thirty-four, the staff wildlife pathologist at Crestwater Wildlife Diagnostics, a six-person independent lab tucked into a converted feed store on the eastern edge of Bozeman, Montana. Crestwater handled necropsies and disease surveillance for three state agencies, two tribal wildlife programs, and a handful of nonprofit field biologists. The lab’s bread and butter was the annual chronic wasting disease surveillance contract with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks—a three-year, $340,000 agreement that paid about 60 percent of payroll and was up for renewal in September. The 87-page annual report due Friday wasn’t just a compliance document. It was the contract renewal.

Solveig Birtanyan had founded Crestwater eleven years ago after two decades as a state wildlife veterinarian, and she’d hired Oluchi straight out of her residency at Cornell. Solveig was fifty-eight, famously unflappable, and had a rule about late-stage panic: “Panic is just data you haven’t sorted yet.” Oluchi had written the rule on a sticky note and kept it on her monitor. Most nights, she believed it.

Tonight, she was testing its limits.

The dangling modifier was error number one. She’d circled it in yellow. But as she kept scrolling, the yellow circles multiplied. By midnight she had a running list in a separate notebook:

  • Dangling modifier on page 34 that arguably implies Crestwater skipped the chain-of-custody audit.
  • A sample-count table on page 41 that totals to 2,847 in the header but 2,841 when you add the column. Off by six.
  • The Gallatin-Madison elk herd is misspelled as “Madison-Galatin” three times in section 5—including once in a header that appears in the table of contents.
  • Three split infinitives in the executive summary.
  • A comma splice on page 12 that makes a prevalence statement sound like two unconnected facts.
  • Section 4, written by Waverly Tjirtanjana, is so dense with jargon (“transmissible spongiform encephalopathy surveillance protocols for cervid populations exhibiting prion-associated neurodegenerative sequelae”) that Oluchi—a wildlife pathologist with a Ph.D.—has to read it twice to parse what Waverly is actually saying.
  • Four photographs of brain-stem tissue have drifted to the page after the paragraph discussing them, separated by an unrelated figure on herd density.

The Gallatin-Madison herd was the one that sent her heart rate into triple digits. Gallatin-Madison wasn’t just any elk herd. It was the herd that ran through the governor’s family ranch—land that had been in the Forsythe-Larraga family for four generations. Kermit Forsythe-Larraga, the senior wildlife disease program director at Montana FWP and the person who would personally read this report, was the governor’s cousin. Misspelling that herd name on page 1 of section 5 was the closest thing to a landmine the entire document could contain.

Section 4, though—section 4 was harder than any of it. Section 4 was Waverly’s.

Waverly Tjirtanjana was twenty-six, eleven months out of her master’s program, and the newest hire at Crestwater. She’d written her first full-length report section this year: an eleven-page overview of surveillance methodology. Oluchi had been her assigned mentor. Solveig had asked Oluchi back in March to give Waverly room to try a full technical section on her own—”because that’s how they learn, and you’re the one with the patience”—and Oluchi had agreed, partly because it was true and partly because Waverly had come in on two snow days in a row to help Oluchi reorganize the deep-freeze storage.

The problem was that Waverly’s section wasn’t wrong. It was exhaustively, painstakingly, line-by-line accurate. It was also almost unreadable. Oluchi had highlighted six sentences on page 1 alone that were more than forty words long. Waverly had used “transmissible spongiform encephalopathy” five times on one page when “CWD” would have worked fine. The section had three split infinitives, two noun-heavy phrases (“the implementation of the standardization of sampling intervals”), and one subject-verb agreement error where “data” was treated as singular in one sentence and plural in the next.

None of it was incompetence. It was the exact kind of writing that a careful, newly credentialed, deeply anxious-to-prove-herself researcher produced when she was writing for people she was afraid of. Oluchi recognized it because she’d written exactly like this once.

She also knew, with a tightness in her jaw, that there was no way section 4 could ship in its current form. Kermit Forsythe-Larraga had said once, at a conference dinner, that he had two rules for contract reports: “Don’t lie to me, and don’t make me work harder than I already do.” Waverly’s section was going to make him work.

Oluchi could hear Solveig’s voice from the management trainings: “When you’re correcting a junior staff member, focus on the document, not the person. Ask questions. Use ‘I’ statements. Never say ‘you.’ And whatever you do, don’t do it at midnight after three cups of coffee.”

Oluchi had already had three cups of coffee.

She considered her options, one at a time, on the back of a receipt for a bag of cat food.

Option 1: Silently rewrite Waverly’s section tonight. Send the report in clean on Thursday. Never tell Waverly. Section 4 gets fixed, the contract is safe, and Waverly thinks she wrote a report that passed unchanged. The problem, of course, is that Waverly never learns what went wrong—and the next section she writes will have the same problems, at higher stakes, and maybe without Oluchi sitting at a kitchen table to catch them.

Option 2: Wake Waverly up. Call her now, tell her section 4 needs a full rewrite before Thursday morning, and hand her an email of every problem. Honest, fast, and the kind of phone call that would follow Waverly for the rest of her career at Crestwater. It would also almost certainly produce a worse draft, because it’s hard to write well at 2 a.m. after a supervisor has called you sobbing about a contract.

Option 3: Tell Solveig. Let the boss handle it. Oluchi isn’t technically Waverly’s supervisor of record—Solveig is, and Solveig had the authority to pull section 4 herself. The problem is that Solveig was in Billings until Wednesday night giving a workshop on necropsy chain-of-custody, and pulling her off that workshop for a phone call about a writing problem would look like Oluchi couldn’t handle the mentorship role Solveig had asked her to take on six months ago.

Option 4: Oluchi wasn’t sure yet what Option 4 was. She only knew it existed because all three of the other options were wrong in different ways, and whatever she decided by sunrise was going to decide two things at once: whether Crestwater’s contract got renewed, and whether Waverly stayed a scientist or quit the field.

Her phone buzzed. It was a text from Solveig, from Billings: “Remember—panic is just data you haven’t sorted yet. Go to bed. You can fix it in the morning. We’re not going to lose the contract over a typo.”

Oluchi looked at the dangling modifier. She looked at the running list of seventeen other problems. She looked at the cat food receipt with the three crossed-out options.

She typed back: “It’s not a typo.”

Then she put the phone face-down on the table, opened a fresh document, and started writing the email she was going to send Waverly at 7 a.m.—the one that was going to have to be kind and honest and urgent and specific all at once, the one that would either salvage section 4 and Waverly’s confidence together or blow up both.

Over the next seventy-two hours, Oluchi would use almost every revision principle in this chapter. She would sort content from organization from style from readability. She would run fact checks against independent sources. She would count conjunctions, shorten sentences, strip jargon, repair a double negative buried on page 62, catch a comma splice that Waverly hadn’t caught, and redesign four pages so the tissue photographs stopped orphaning themselves across page breaks. She would sit across a coffee-shop table from a scared twenty-six-year-old and figure out how to say “this section needs to be half as long and twice as clear” without saying it that way. She would hand the final PDF to Solveig at 4:12 p.m. Thursday afternoon. And she would still not know, when she did, whether the contract was safe.

What she did know, watching Solveig scroll through the final pages on the lab’s conference-room projector, was that she’d learned something about revision that she hadn’t known at 11:47 p.m. on Tuesday: revision is never really about fixing a document. It’s about protecting the people who trust you to send it.

We’ll come back to Oluchi’s seventy-two hours at the end of the chapter.

Before You Read

Before diving into this chapter, take a moment to think through your current instincts about revision. You’ll revisit these at the end of the chapter in a Self-Assessment to see how your thinking has shifted.

  1. When you finish writing a draft, what’s your next move? Do you hand it off immediately, read it once for typos, walk away for a day, read it aloud, run it through a spell checker and call it done, or something else?
  2. If you had to rank content, organization, style, and readability in order of importance for a business document going to a state agency, how would you rank them—and why?
  3. A colleague hands you a report section that’s factually correct but almost unreadable because of jargon, long sentences, and noun-heavy phrases. What’s your first sentence to them when you deliver feedback?
  4. Does spell-check catch the sentence “The major will attend the meeting” when the writer meant “mayor”? Why or why not? What does this tell you about the limits of automated tools?

Hold on to your answers. The chapter will push on several of them.

Getting Started

Introductory Exercises

  1. Find an article you read online and review it, noting at least one area that would benefit from revision. Share your results with classmates.
  2. Exchange draft revisions of a document prepared for a class or work assignment with a classmate or colleague. Note at least one strength and one area for improvement. Provide feedback to the writer.

One of the hardest tests you’ll face is peer review. In many professional settings—including academia, marketing, and engineering—your work will be evaluated by colleagues. A professor submits a research article to a professional journal, and peers in the same field review it. A marketing manager has a colleague review copy for a new website. An engineer peer-reviews a technical manual. The scrutiny is real, and it matters.

Business writing values results. You’re working in an environment where you don’t control all the variables, can’t design every context, and can’t limit the scope of your inquiry. Your document will be read by people you never met—people you didn’t even know would see it—and errors will hurt its performance.

Today’s business climate is results-oriented, regardless of your career, industry, or profession. Misunderstandings and miscommunications can and will happen. While you won’t always control the importance of the ideas you’re assigned to communicate, you can control one thing: errors. Avoid mistakes—both in the document itself and in how your audience interprets your message—and you give your document its best chance of success. That’s why thorough revision matters.

As you review and evaluate documents (your own and others’), keep three goals in mind: be correct, be clear, and be concise. Then focus on effectiveness and efficiency. In a climate of increasing demands and limited resources like time, you need to get it right the first time.

The environment of a business writer can be stressful, but it can also be rewarding. Recognition from your peers—suppliers, internal colleagues, or customers—makes it worthwhile. Still, the reward often comes as silence. When your document clearly meets expectations and accomplishes its goal, the outcome may simply be the absence of error or misinterpretation—a rare occasion that goes unheralded. As a business writer, you need to value your own work and notice what works. When it does, take pride in your effort. You may not always be celebrated for your error-free documents that communicate ideas clearly, but know that they are successful. Their success is your success.

7.1 General Revision Points to Consider

Learning Objectives

  1. Describe revision as a distinct phase of writing, separate from drafting and proofreading.
  2. Identify the four general categories of revision: content, organization, style, and readability.
  3. Apply each of the four categories to evaluate a business document in a stepwise way.
  4. Explain why stepping away from a draft before revising it improves the quality of revision.
  5. Distinguish between machine-generated readability scores and the judgment a human writer brings to audience fit.

When you think your document is done, the revision process begins. Runners often talk about “hitting the wall,” where physical exertion meets its limits and exhaustion looms. Writing takes effort too—from overcoming writer’s block to the intense concentration that composing a document demands. It’s natural to feel relief when your document is drafted from beginning to end. But that relief? It’s false confidence. Your document isn’t complete. In its current state, it could do more harm than good. Errors, omissions, and unclear phrases lurk within, waiting to reflect poorly on you when they reach your audience. Now isn’t the time to let your guard down, celebrate prematurely, or mentally move on to the next assignment. Think of revision as a process that hardens and strengthens your document, even if it means sacrificing some hard-earned writing.

General revision requires attention to content, organization, style, and readability. These four categories give you a template to explore in depth. A quick scan of these elements isn’t enough—even for the briefest review. Throughout this chapter, we’ll explore ways to expand your revision efforts to cover common areas of weakness and error. You may need to step away from your document and return with fresh eyes. Writers often juggle multiple projects at different stages, leaving one document to return to another without losing valuable production time. Your goal is the same as during preparation and production: a clear mind.

Case Connection: Oluchi’s Four-Category Scan

Look at Oluchi’s midnight list. Every error she circles falls into one of the four general revision categories, and that’s not an accident—it’s how experienced revisers sort triage before they fix anything.

Content: The sample-count total that reads 2,847 but adds to 2,841. That’s a content error—a factual claim that’s wrong.

Organization: The tissue photographs that drifted to the page after the paragraph discussing them. That’s an organization error—the pieces are right, but they’re in the wrong order for the reader.

Style: Waverly’s section 4, where every sentence is technically correct but almost nobody could read it quickly. Style.

Readability: The split infinitives and the forty-word sentences that make Kermit Forsythe-Larraga slow down. Readability.

The dangling modifier on page 34 is a hybrid—technically it’s grammar (style), but its consequence is that readers will misunderstand the content. That’s why experienced writers sort errors by category before they fix them: because a style problem that creates a content problem is a different kind of urgent than a style problem that just makes you look bad. Oluchi will spend her first hour on Wednesday sorting, not fixing.

Evaluate Content

Content is only one aspect of your document. Say you were assigned a report on sales trends for a specific product in a new market. You could produce a one-page chart comparing last year’s results to current figures and call it a day—but would it clearly and concisely deliver useful, correct content? Are you supposed to highlight trends? Spotlight factors that contributed to increases or decreases? Include projections for next year? The questions could continue, but for now, let’s focus on content and its relationship to the assignment. Have you included content that corresponds to the given assignment? Left anything out that’s necessary to fulfill expectations? Gone beyond the directions? Content addresses the central questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how within the range and parameters of the assignment.

Evaluate Organization

Organization is another key aspect of any document. Standard formats—introduction, body, conclusion—may be part of your document, but did you choose a direct or indirect approach? Can you tell? A direct approach announces the main point or purpose at the beginning, while an indirect approach presents an introduction first. Your document may use any of a wide variety of organizing principles: chronological, spatial, compare-and-contrast. Is your organizing principle clear to the reader?

Beyond overall organization, pay special attention to transitions. Readers struggle to follow a document when the writer fails to make one point relevant to the next or to show relationships between points. Your conclusion should mirror your introduction and not introduce new material.

Evaluate Style

Style emerges through content and organization but also involves word choice and grammatical structures. Is your document written in an informal or formal tone—or does it present a blend, a mix, or an awkward mismatch? Does it provide a coherent, unifying voice with a professional tone? If you’re collaborating with other writers or contributors, pay special attention to unifying the document across different writing styles. Even if everyone writes in a professional, formal style, the document may lack a consistent voice. Read it out loud. Can you tell who wrote what? If so, you need more revision.

Pro Tip: The Two-Voice Test

When a document is written by more than one author—or by one author across more than one week—style drift is almost guaranteed. Here’s a simple test: print the document, then read a page at random out loud to yourself. Then read a different page from a different section. If the two pages sound like they were written by different people, they were.

You don’t always have to smooth that difference away. Sometimes two voices is appropriate—a technical appendix will sound different from a cover letter, and it should. But if the two voices appear inside the same section, a reader will feel the bump even if they can’t name it. Smooth the voice inside each section. Let the voice shift at section boundaries if the sections have different jobs.

Oluchi’s two-voice problem isn’t between her and Waverly—it’s between Waverly’s opening paragraph (which is actually readable, because Waverly was relaxed) and Waverly’s middle pages (which got denser as she got more anxious). The bump is inside section 4.

Evaluate Readability

Readability refers to the reader’s ability to read and comprehend the document. Various tools estimate a document’s reading level, often correlating it to a school grade. If this chapter has a reading level of 11.8, it’s appropriate for most eleventh-grade readers. But just because you’re in grade thirteen, eighteen, or twenty-one doesn’t mean your audience reads at a postsecondary level in everyday use. As a business writer, your goal is to make writing clear and concise—not complex and challenging.

You can often use the “Tools” menu in your word processing program to determine approximate reading level. The program evaluates characters per word, words per sentence, and produces a rating. It may also note the percentage of passive sentences and other information for evaluating readability. Like any computer-generated rating, use it as one point of evaluation—not the only one. Your effort to choose words appropriate for your audience will serve you better than any software evaluation.

Common Mistake: Mistaking “Formal” for “Hard to Read”

A lot of beginning professional writers assume that a formal audience wants formal-sounding writing—and that formal-sounding writing means long sentences, Latinate vocabulary, and the passive voice. That’s how Waverly ends up with “transmissible spongiform encephalopathy surveillance protocols for cervid populations exhibiting prion-associated neurodegenerative sequelae” when she could have written “CWD surveillance in elk.”

Formal doesn’t mean hard. Formal means appropriate to the setting: correct grammar, accurate terminology, no slang, proper citation, and a respectful tone. Kermit Forsythe-Larraga wants a formal report. He does not want a hard one. The difference matters because the two things point in opposite directions—formal readability goes up when you shorten sentences, prefer concrete words, and let the reader find your meaning without having to excavate it. Formality is about register. Readability is about effort. You can—and should—have both.

Revision is not proofreading, and it is not the same as writing a second draft. Revision is the phase where you step back from the thing you just made and ask whether it still does what it was supposed to do. Sometimes that means a small tweak to a transition. Sometimes it means pulling an entire section and starting over. Experienced writers expect both possibilities and don’t take either one personally.

Try It: Sort Before You Fix

Take any document you’ve written in the past month—an email that turned into a small project, a paper, a memo, a report. Read it once. Make a running list of every problem you notice. Do not fix anything yet.

Now sort each problem into one of four columns: Content, Organization, Style, Readability. If a problem belongs in more than one column, put it in both and mark it (C/S for content-plus-style, for example). When you’re done, count the columns. Which one is longest?

Writers tend to have a favorite failure mode—some of us consistently underwrite content, others over-write style, others forget about organization entirely. You’ll see your pattern in the column counts. That pattern is worth knowing, because it tells you where to look first every time you revise something new.

Before you get to the section-closing key takeaways, remember that the four categories aren’t a checklist you run once and put down. They’re a way of thinking about what a document owes its reader. Content owes accuracy. Organization owes a sensible path from beginning to end. Style owes consistency of voice. Readability owes the reader the ability to finish the document without working harder than the content demands. Miss any one of those, and the document stops doing its job.

Key Takeaways

The four main categories—content, organization, style, and readability—provide a template for general revision.

Exercises

  1. Select a document—an article from a website, newspaper, magazine, or a piece of writing you’ve completed for a course. Evaluate it according to the four main categories described in this section. Could the document benefit from revision in any of these areas? Discuss your findings with classmates.
  2. Interview a coworker or colleague and ask specifically how much time and attention they dedicate to revising their written work. Compare your results with classmates.
  3. Find a particularly good example of writing according to the above criteria. Review it and share it with classmates.
  4. Find a particularly bad example of writing according to the above criteria. Review it and share it with classmates.

7.2 Specific Revision Points to Consider

Learning Objectives

  1. List and describe the six specific revision checkpoints: format, facts, names, spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
  2. Explain why independent verification of facts matters more than rechecking against the original source.
  3. Identify the three most common comma errors—comma splice, missing comma after introductory phrase, missing comma before conjunction joining independent clauses—and correct them in sample sentences.
  4. Distinguish between possessive and contraction uses of the apostrophe, especially for “its” and “it’s.”
  5. Recognize why a spell checker cannot catch a correctly spelled word used in the wrong place.

When revising your document, it helps to focus on specific points. Examining each point in turn breaks the revision process into manageable steps. When you’ve examined each point, you can feel confident that you’ve avoided many possible errors. Specific revision requires attention to the following:

  • Format
  • Facts
  • Names
  • Spelling
  • Punctuation
  • Grammar

Let’s examine these one by one.

Format

Format is an important part of revision. It involves the design expectations of author and audience. If a letter format typically places the date at the top, or the sender’s address on the left side before the salutation, the information should be in the correct location. Messy formatting—or formatting that doesn’t conform to company style—reflects poorly on you before the reader even starts reading. Present a document that’s properly formatted according to your organization’s and readers’ expectations, and you start off with a good impression.

Facts

Another key part of revision is checking your facts. Did you know that news organizations and magazines employ professional fact-checkers? These workers examine every article before publication and consult sources to verify accuracy. They might call people who were interviewed—”Mr. Diaz, our report states that you are thirty-nine years old. Our article will be published on the fifteenth. Will that be your correct age on that date?” Fact-checking also means looking things up in encyclopedias, directories, atlases, and standard reference works, and increasingly in online sources.

While you can’t be expected to have the skills of a professional fact-checker, you do need to reread your writing with a critical eye toward the information in it. Inaccurate content can expose you and your organization to liability and will create far more work than simply revising a document. When you revise, ask yourself:

  • Does my writing contain statistics or references that need verification?
  • Where can I get reliable information to verify them?

Independent verification is often useful—look up the fact in a different source from where you first got it. Perhaps a colleague gave you a list of closing averages for the Dow Jones Industrial on certain dates. You still have the list, so you can confirm your document agrees with the numbers your colleague provided. But what if your colleague made a mistake? The websites of the Wall Street Journal and other major newspapers list Dow closings, so it’s reasonably easy to look up the numbers and verify them independently.

Pro Tip: The Independent-Source Rule

When Oluchi finds the sample-count error on page 41—2,847 in the header, 2,841 in the column—her first instinct is to look at the spreadsheet the table was pulled from. But here’s the catch: that spreadsheet was the original source of the error. Rechecking a number against the source of the error just confirms the error.

The independent-source rule: if a number is important, verify it against a source that does not share a history with the source you got it from. For Oluchi, that means going back to the raw lab intake log—the handwritten notebook pages that get scanned into the system each week—and counting from there. The raw count is 2,841. The header is wrong. She now knows which number to fix.

This rule applies to almost every kind of fact: names (check the person’s own published profile, not a secondhand reference), dates (check a primary record, not a summary), statistics (check the original report, not a news article about the original report). Independent verification takes longer, but it’s the only kind of fact-checking that actually catches upstream errors.

Names

There’s no more embarrassing error in business writing than misspelling someone’s name. Spelling a customer’s name “Jonh” instead of “John” in an email or report might seem like a small error, but it immediately signals a lack of attention to detail and can damage a professional relationship. Attribution is one way we often use names, and giving credit where it’s due is essential. Regardless of your reasons for including a name, make sure the spelling is correct. Incorrect spelling undermines your credibility quickly and can negatively impact your organization’s reputation. In some cases, it may even have legal ramifications.

Case Connection: The Elk Herd That Wasn’t

“Madison-Galatin” is a proper noun error. Spell-check will not flag it, because “Galatin” isn’t flagged by a dictionary that doesn’t know the word “Gallatin” to begin with. A human reader who has never heard of the herd won’t flag it either. A human reader who has heard of the herd—any human reader who lives in the Gallatin Valley, or any human reader who works for Montana FWP, or any human reader who is named Forsythe-Larraga—will absolutely flag it, and their flag will not be the generous kind.

Names are a category where independent verification is not optional. For every proper noun in a high-stakes document—every person, place, organization, product name, or herd—look it up against its own canonical source. For a person, that’s their own byline or email signature. For a place, that’s the USGS gazetteer or an official government website. For a herd name Montana FWP has been publishing for twenty years, that’s any Montana FWP publication. Oluchi fixes “Madison-Galatin” to “Gallatin-Madison” by pulling the 2023 Montana FWP cervid report and confirming the spelling letter by letter. It takes her ninety seconds. Not doing it could have cost her the contract.

Spelling

Correct spelling is essential for your credibility, and errors will be glaringly apparent to many readers. The negative impact on your reputation—and the perception that you lack attention to detail or don’t value your work—will be hard to overcome. Beyond personal consequences, spelling errors can become factual errors and destroy content value. This may lead you to click “spell check” in your word processing program, but computer spell-checking isn’t enough. Spell checkers have improved since they were first invented, but they’re not infallible. They make mistakes.

Typically, your incorrect word may actually be a word—and therefore, according to the program, correct. Suppose you wrote, “The major will attend the meeting” when you meant to write “The mayor will attend the meeting.” The program would miss this error because “major” is a word, but your meaning would be twisted beyond recognition.

Common Mistake: Trusting the Green Squiggle

Modern grammar and spell checkers are genuinely useful. They catch typos, flag homonyms sometimes, suggest better punctuation, and catch many (not all) subject-verb agreement errors. They are also, consistently, wrong in predictable ways: they miss correctly spelled words used in the wrong place, they over-flag passive voice in contexts where passive voice is appropriate, and they will happily accept a sentence that means the opposite of what the author intended as long as each individual word is real.

The best way to use a checker is the way Oluchi uses hers—as a first pass that catches obvious errors so her human attention is free for the errors the machine can’t see. She runs the checker on the full report at 7 a.m. Wednesday. It flags forty-one items. She fixes them in eleven minutes. Then she reads the report with human eyes, and in the next three hours she catches seventeen more errors the checker missed—including every one of the seventeen on her midnight list.

Use the machine. Don’t trust the machine.

Punctuation

Punctuation marks are the traffic signals, signs, and indicators that help us navigate the written word. They warn us when a transition is coming or a complete thought has ended. A period indicates the thought is complete; a comma signals that additional elements or modifiers are coming. Correct signals help your reader follow thoughts through sentences and paragraphs, enabling you to communicate with maximum efficiency while reducing the probability of error.[1]

Table 7.1 “Punctuation Marks” lists twelve punctuation marks commonly used in English, in alphabetical order, along with an example of each.

Table 7.1 Punctuation Marks
Symbol Example
Apostrophe ‘ Michele’s report is due tomorrow.
Colon : This is what I think: you need to revise your paper.
Comma , The report advised us when to sell, what to sell, and where to find buyers.
Dash — This is more difficult than it seems—buyers are scarce when credit is tight.
Ellipsis … Lincoln spoke of “a new nation…dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Exclamation Point ! How exciting!
Hyphen – The question is a many-faceted one.
Parentheses ( ) To answer it (or at least to begin addressing it) we will need more information.
Period . The answer is no. Period. Full stop.
Question Mark ? Can I talk you into changing your mind?
Quotation Marks ” “ The manager told him, “I will make sure Renée is available to help you.”
Semicolon ; Theresa was late to the meeting; her computer had frozen and she was stuck at her desk until a tech rep came to fix it.

It may be daunting to realize that the number of possible punctuation errors is as extensive as the number of symbols and constructions available. Software may catch many punctuation errors, but again, a committed writer makes the difference. Here we’ll cover how to avoid mistakes with three commonly used punctuation marks: the comma, the semicolon, and the apostrophe.

Commas

The comma is probably the most versatile of all punctuation marks. This means you can use your judgment in many cases as to whether you need a comma or not. It also means that the possible errors involving commas are many. Commas are necessary some of the time, but careless writers often place a comma where it’s not needed.

Commas separate two independent clauses joined by a conjunction like “but,” “and,” and “or.”

Example
The advertising department is effective, but don’t expect miracles in this business climate.

Commas are not used to join two independent clauses alone. This is known as the comma splice error, and the way to correct it is to insert a conjunction after the comma.

Examples
The advertising department is effective, the sales department needs to produce more results.
The advertising department is effective, but the sales department needs to produce more results.

Commas are used for introductory phrases and to offset clauses that aren’t essential to the sentence. If the meaning remains intact without the words, they’re nonessential.

Examples
After the summary of this year’s sales, the sales department had good reason to celebrate.
The sales department, last year’s winner of the most productive award, celebrated their stellar sales success this year.
The sales department celebrated their stellar sales success this year.

Commas offset words that help create unity across a sentence, like “however” and “therefore.”

Examples
The sales department discovered, however, that the forecast for next year is challenging.
However, the sales department discovered that the forecast for next year is challenging.

Commas often separate more than one adjective modifying a noun.

Example
The sales department discovered the troublesome, challenging forecast for next year.

Commas separate addresses, dates, and titles; they’re also used in dialogue sequences.

Examples
John is from Ancud, Chile.
Katy was born on August 2, 2002.
Mackenzie McLean, D. V., is an excellent veterinarian.
Lisa said, “When writing, omit needless words.”

Semicolons

Semicolons have two uses. First, they indicate relationships among groups of items in a series when commas separate individual items. Second, a semicolon can join two independent clauses—another way to avoid the comma splice error. Using a semicolon this way is often effective if the meaning of the two independent clauses is linked, such as in a cause-and-effect relationship.

Examples
Merchandise on order includes women’s wear such as sweaters, skirts, and blouses; men’s wear such as shirts, jackets, and slacks; and outwear such as coats, parkas, and hats.
The sales campaign was successful; without its contributions our bottom line would have been dismal indeed.

Apostrophes

The apostrophe, like the semicolon, has two uses: it replaces letters omitted in a contraction, and it often indicates the possessive.

Because contractions are associated with an informal style, they may not be appropriate for some professional writing. As always, the business writer evaluates the expectations and audience of the assignment.

Examples
It’s great news that sales were up. It is also good news that we’ve managed to reduce our advertising costs.

When you indicate possession, pay attention to the apostrophe’s placement. Nouns commonly receive “‘s” when made possessive. But plurals ending in “s” receive a hanging apostrophe when made possessive, and “it” forms the possessive (“its”) with no apostrophe at all.

Examples
Mackenzie‘s sheep are ready to be sheared.
The parents‘ meeting is scheduled for Thursday.
We are willing to adopt a dog that has already had its shots.

Grammar

Learning to use good, correct standard English grammar is more of a practice than an event—or even a process. Grammar involves the written construction of meaning from words and includes customs that evolve and adapt to usage over time. Because grammar is constantly changing, none of us can sit back and assume we “know” how to write with proper grammar. Instead, write and revise with close attention to grammar, keeping in mind that grammatical errors can undermine your credibility, reflect poorly on your employer, and cause misunderstandings.

Jean Wyrick has provided a list of common grammar errors to watch for, which we’ve adapted here for easy reference.[2] In each case, the error is in italics and the [correct form] is italicized within square brackets.

Subject-Verb Agreement

The subject and verb should agree on the number under consideration. In faulty writing, a singular subject is sometimes mismatched with a plural verb form, or vice versa.

Examples
Sales have not been consistent and they doesn’t [do not] reflect your hard work and effort.
The president appreciates your hard work and wish [wishes] to thank you.

Verb Tense

Verb tense refers to the point in time where action occurs. The most common tenses are past, present, and future. There’s nothing wrong with mixing tenses in a sentence if the action is intended to take place at different times. In faulty or careless writing, however, tenses are often mismatched illogically.

Examples
Sharon was under pressure to finish the report, so she uses [used] a shortcut to paste in the sales figures.
The sales department holds a status meeting every week, and last week’s meeting will be [was] at the Garden Inn.

Split Infinitive

The infinitive form of a verb is one without a reference to time, and in its standard form, it includes the auxiliary word “to,” as in “to write is to revise.” It has been customary to keep the “to” next to the verb; placing an adverb between them is known as splitting the infinitive. Some modern writers do this all the time (for example, “to boldly go…”), and since all grammar is essentially a set of customs governing the written word, you’ll need to understand what custom prevails where you work. If you’re working with colleagues trained over the last fifty years, they may find split infinitives annoying. For this reason, it’s often best to avoid splitting an infinitive wherever you can do so without distorting the sentence’s meaning.

Examples
The Marketing Department needs assistance to accurately understand our readers [to understand our readers accurately].
David pondered how to best revise [how best to revise] the sentence.

Double Negative

A double negative uses two negatives to communicate a single idea, duplicating the negation. In some languages, such as Spanish, when the main action in the sentence is negative, it’s correct to express other elements in the sentence negatively as well. In English, however, this is incorrect. In addition to sounding wrong (you can often hear the error if you read the sentence out loud), a double negative in English causes a logic error—two negatives cancel each other out and yield a positive. In fact, ballot measures are often criticized for confusing voters with double negatives.

Examples
John doesn’t need no [any] assistance with his sales presentation. [Or John needs no assistance with his sales presentation.]
Jeri could not find no [any] reason to approve the request. [Or Jeri could find no reason to approve the request.]

Irregular Verbs

Most verbs represent the past with the suffix “ed,” as in “ask” becomes “asked.” Irregular verbs change a vowel or convert to another word in the past tense. Consider “to go”—the past tense is “went,” not “goed.”

Examples
The need arised [arose] to seek additional funding.
Katy leaped [leapt] onto the stage to introduce the presentation.

Commas in a Series

A comma separates items in a series, but in some writing styles, the comma is omitted between the final two items, where the conjunction joins the last and next-to-last items. The comma in this position is known as the “serial comma” or the “Oxford comma.” The serial comma is typically required in academic writing and usually omitted in journalism. Other writers omit it if the final two items in the series have a closer logical connection than the other items. In business writing, use it or omit it according to the prevailing style in your organization or industry. Know your audience and be aware of the rules.

Examples
Lisa is an amazing wife, mother, teacher, gardener, and editor.
Lisa is an amazing wife, mother teacher, gardener and editor.
Lisa is an amazing teacher, editor, gardener, wife and mother.

Faulty Comparisons

When comparing two objects by degree, don’t mention “est,” as in “biggest”—all you can really say is that one is bigger than the other. If you’re comparing three or more objects, then “est” accurately communicates which is the “biggest” of them all.

Examples
Between the twins, Mackenzie is the fastest [faster] of the two.
Among our three children, Mackenzie is the tallest.

Dangling Modifiers

Modifiers describe a subject in a sentence or indicate how or when the subject carried out the action. If the subject is omitted, the modifier intended for it is left dangling—hanging out on its own without a clear relationship to the sentence. Who is doing the seeing in the first sentence?

Examples
Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, celebrations were in order.
Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, we decided that celebrations were in order.

Case Connection: Oluchi’s Dangling Modifier

Return to the sentence that sent Oluchi into a spiral at 11:47 p.m.:

“After completing a full chain-of-custody audit, the prevalence estimates appear reliable.”

The subject of “after completing a full chain-of-custody audit” is missing. Grammatically, the sentence makes it sound like the estimates completed the audit. More dangerously, a reader looking for ambiguity—say, a contract reviewer looking for an excuse to withhold renewal—could read it as Crestwater failing to say who completed the audit at all.

The fix is one added subject:

“After Crestwater completed a full chain-of-custody audit, the prevalence estimates appear reliable.”

One word—”Crestwater”—and two small verb-tense shifts, and the legal ambiguity is gone. This is why dangling modifiers matter in professional writing. A dangling modifier in a novel is awkward. A dangling modifier in a contract report can be the difference between “compliant” and “noncompliant.”

Misplaced Modifiers

Modifiers that are misplaced aren’t lost—they’re simply in the wrong place. Their unfortunate location is often far from the word or words they describe, making it easy for readers to misinterpret the sentence.

Examples
Trying to avoid the deer, the tree hit my car.
My car hit the tree when I tried to avoid a deer in the road.

The six specific revision points—format, facts, names, spelling, punctuation, and grammar—don’t replace the four general categories from section 7.1. They drill into them. Format is a subset of organization. Facts are a subset of content. Names, spelling, punctuation, and grammar are all subsets of style and readability. A good reviser zooms out to the four, then zooms in to the six, and treats both layers as one integrated scan.

Key Takeaways

By revising for format, facts, names, spelling, punctuation, and grammar, you can increase your chances of correcting many common errors in your writing.

Exercises

  1. Select a news article from a website, newspaper, or magazine. Find as many facts in the article as you can that could require fact-checking. Then check as many of these facts as you can, using sources available in the library and online. Did you find any errors? Discuss your findings with classmates.
  2. Find an example of an assertion without attribution and share it with classmates.
  3. Find an example of an error in a published document and share it with classmates.
  4. Interview a coworker or colleague and ask them specifically to share a story where an error slipped past them during revision and made it to print or publication. How did they handle it? How much time did it take to correct? What did they learn from the experience? Compare your results with classmates.

7.3 Style Revisions

Learning Objectives

  1. Discuss and demonstrate the use of twelve points to consider for style revisions.
  2. Identify long sentences, noun-heavy phrases, and obscured verbs in your own drafts.
  3. Apply the read-aloud test to catch awkward phrasing, filler, and parallel-construction errors.
  4. Distinguish between simple and simplistic writing, and explain why formal audiences prefer the former.
  5. Use the “Is it professional?” test as a final style filter before delivery.

You know the difference between cloudy and clear water, but can you tell when your writing is cloudy? When meaning hides in shadows? When the message you’re trying to communicate is obscured by the style you use to present it? Water filtration removes particulates and harmful materials, clarifying the water. In the same way, revision requires filtration. You may come across word choices you thought were appropriate at the time, or notice words you thought you wrote but are absent. Some words and sentence constructions hinder effective delivery and need attention. Some transitions fail to show connections between thoughts and need to be changed.

Another way to think about revision—clarifying specifically—is the standard reference to a diamond in the rough. Like muddy water, diamonds don’t have significant value until their rough edges are removed, they receive expert polish, and they’re evaluated for clarity. Your attention to this critical process will enhance the value of your writing as it begins to communicate your intended meaning more accurately. Now isn’t the time to lose momentum. Now is the time to make your writing shine.

Here we’ll discuss several strategies to help clarify your writing style. If you’ve made wise word choices, the next step to clarifying your document is taking it sentence by sentence. Each sentence should stand on its own, but each sentence is also interdependent on all others in your document. These strategies will require significant attention to detail and an awareness of grammar that might not be your strength—but the more you practice them, the more they become good habits that enhance your writing.

Case Connection: Section 4 and the Forty-Word Sentence

Here is an actual sentence from Waverly Tjirtanjana’s draft of section 4:

“Through the implementation of the standardization of sampling intervals across participating Game Management Units, we have been able to achieve more robust prevalence estimates for the purpose of longitudinal comparison and subsequent statistical inference regarding temporal trends in chronic wasting disease among the cervid populations under active surveillance.”

That’s one sentence. It’s 52 words long. It contains four obscured verbs (“implementation,” “standardization,” “comparison,” “inference”). It contains three long prepositional phrases. It has a bureaucratic preamble (“Through the implementation of…”). It has a filler phrase (“for the purpose of”). And it is not, technically, wrong.

Oluchi’s Thursday morning rewrite of the same sentence:

“Standardizing sampling intervals across participating Game Management Units gave us sharper prevalence estimates, which let us compare CWD trends in these elk herds over time.”

That’s 27 words. Same meaning. Half the effort for the reader. Every one of the twelve style revision strategies in this section appears, at least once, in how Oluchi got from the first sentence to the second.

Break Up Long Sentences

Revising long sentences often increases overall clarity. Start with one strategy that produces immediate results: count the conjunctions in your document. Word processing programs can search for a specific word—”and” will do just fine. Simple sentences frequently become compound and complex through the word “and.” The farther the subject, action, and modifiers are from one another, the more complex the sentence becomes—and the higher the probability of reader error and misunderstanding. Look for “and” and evaluate whether the sentence has two complete thoughts or ideas. Does it try to join two dissimilar ideas that are better off on their own?

In prose and expository writing classes, you may have learned that complex sentences can evoke emotions, settings, and scenes that create a sense of place and time. In business writing, our goals aim more toward precision and eliminating error—a good business document won’t read like a college essay. A professor may have advised you to avoid short, choppy writing. Are we asking you to do something along those lines? No. Choppy writing is hard to follow, but simple, clear writing does the job with a minimum of fuss and without decoration.

In their best-selling book The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White emphasize clarity as a central goal. However, one of their rules is: “Do not break sentences in two.”[3] As effective business writers, we agree with this rule, and while it may seem to contradict the preceding paragraph, let’s consider what they mean. They encourage writers to avoid sentence fragments by not using a period where the sentence needs a comma. An independent clause should be connected to a dependent clause when necessary, and as we’ve discussed previously, a comma and conjunction are appropriate for the task. A sentence fragment can’t stand alone, so we agree with the rule as written.

But we would also qualify its use: when you have two long and awkward independent clauses that form an unwieldy sentence, it may indeed be better to divide them into two independent sentences. Your skill as a business writer is required to balance the needs of the sentence to communicate meaning with your understanding of audience expectations. Clarity often involves concise sentences.

Revise Big Words and Long Phrases

Big words can clutter your writing with needless jargon that may be a barrier to many readers. Even if you know your audience has significant education and training in a field, you may need to include definitions and examples to communicate meaning effectively. Don’t confuse simple writing with simplistic writing. Your task almost certainly won’t require an elementary approach for new readers. Still, it may very well require attention to words and the degree to which they contribute to—or detract from—communicating your intended message. Long noun sequences, often used as descriptive phrases, can reduce clarity. If you need to describe a noun, use a phrase that modifies the noun clearly, with commas to offset where needed.

Another long phrase to watch: the introduction. Long preambles can make the sentence awkward and require revision. Sentences that start with “It is” or “There are” can often be shortened or clarified through revision.

Evaluate Long Prepositional Phrases

A prepositional phrase is composed of a preposition (a “where” word; a word indicating location) and its object, which may be a noun, pronoun, or clause. Some examples of simple prepositional phrases include “with Tom,” “before me,” and “inside the building security perimeter.”

Prepositional phrases are necessary—it would be difficult to write without them—but some add to word count without adding much to the sentence. Bureaucratic writing often uses this technique to make a sentence sound important, but the effort usually has the undesirable dual effects of obscuring meaning and sounding pompous.

Examples
The 1040 Form will in all certainty serve the majority of our customers.
The 1040 Form will certainly serve the majority of our customers.

The revision places an adverb in place of a long prepositional phrase, reducing word count while strengthening the sentence.

Delete Repetitious Words

Some repetition is expected and can be beneficial. Consistency in word use is also essential when precise terminology is appropriate. However, needless repetition makes your document less vigorous and discourages readers. For example, using “said” when attributing dialogue is acceptable a couple of times, but if it’s the only word you use, it loses impact quickly. People can “indicate,” “point out,” “share,” and “mention” as easily as they can “say” words or phrases. Synonyms help avoid the boredom of repetition.

Eliminate Archaic Expressions or References

Some writing has been ritualized to the point of cliché and has lost its impact. Consider “Heretofore, we have discussed the goal of omitting needless words.” Heretofore is an outdated word that could easily be cut. Another example: “as per your request for documents that emphasize clarity and reduce reader error.” Feel free to eliminate as per from your word choices.

Similar to outdated words and phrases, some references are equally obsolete. While it’s important to recognize leaders in a field—and this text does include references to pioneers in communication—it also focuses on current research and concepts. Without additional clarification and examples, readers may not understand references to an author who passed long ago, even though they made an essential contribution. For example, Shannon and Weaver pioneered the linear model of communication that revolutionized our understanding of interaction and contributed to computer interfaces as we know them today.[4] However, mentioning them without explaining how their work relates to our current context may lose readers. Similarly, references to older films like My Fair Lady may be less understood than more current examples of a transformative process, like Andy Sachs’s journey in The Devil Wears Prada or Mia Thermopolis’s in The Princess Diaries.

Avoid Fillers

Like, you know, like, you know what I mean, ahh, umm—all the fillers you may use or hear in oral communication have, well, little or no place in the written word. Review your writing for extra words that serve the written equivalent of “like” and omit them. They don’t serve you as an author and don’t serve your reading audience.

Eliminate Slang

Many professionals, including college professors, have received emails that use informal characteristics of text messages—abbreviations (“lol”), lack of capitalization, and nonstandard punctuation. While this style is appropriate for casual communication, using it in professional documents can appear unprofessional and undermine the writer’s credibility. If your goal is to be professional, and the audience doesn’t expect slang, then it’s inappropriate to include. Eliminate slang as you would a jargon term that blocks understanding. Not everyone will appreciate your slang word any more than they would a highly specialized term, and it will defeat your purpose. Norms for capitalization and punctuation that are routinely abandoned in efficient text messages or tweets are necessary and required in professional documents. Finally, there’s no place in reputable business writing for offensive slang or profanity.

Evaluate Clichés

Clichés are words or phrases that, through overuse, have lost their impact. That definition doesn’t imply they’ve lost their meaning—sometimes a well-placed cliché communicates effectively. “Actions speak louder than words” is a cliché, but its five words speak volumes that many readers will recognize. This appeal to familiarity can be an effective strategy, but use it carefully. Excessive reliance on clichés makes your writing trite, while eliminating them entirely may not serve you either. As an effective business writer, you need to evaluate your use of clichés for their impact versus their detraction from your message.

Emphasize Precise Words

Concrete words that are immediately available to your audience are often more effective than abstract terms requiring definitions, examples, and qualifications. All these strategies have their place, but excessive use of abstractions makes your document less precise, requiring additional clarification—which translates to work for you as the author and, more importantly, for your readers. Qualifiers deserve special mention here. Some instructors may indicate that words like “may,” “seems,” or “apparently” make your writing weak. Words are just words, and it’s how we use them that creates meaning. Some qualifiers are necessary, particularly if the document serves as a record or may be discussed in a legal issue. In other cases, direct language is required and qualifiers must be eliminated. Too many qualifiers weaken your writing, but too few can expose you to liability. As a business writer, your understanding of audience expectations and assignment requirements will guide you to judicious use of qualifiers.

Evaluate Parallel Construction

When you’re writing in a series or have more than one idea to express, present them consistently to preserve and promote unity across your document. Parallel construction refers to using the same grammatical pattern; it can be applied to words, phrases, and sentences. For example, “We found the seminar interesting, entertaining, and inspiring” is a sentence with parallel construction, whereas “We found the seminar interesting, entertaining, and it inspired us” is not. If your sentences don’t flow well, particularly when you read them out loud, look for misplaced parallels and change them to make the construction truly parallel.

Obscured Verbs

Business writing should be clear and concise. If meaning is obscured, revision is required. One common problem is converting verbs into nouns by adding suffixes like: -ant, -ent, -ion, -tion, -sion, -ence, -ance, and -ing. Instead of hiding meaning within the phrase “through the consolidation of,” consider using the verb forms “consolidated” or “consolidating.” Similarly, instead of “the inclusion of,” consider using “including,” which will likely make the sentence more active and vigorous.

Pro Tip: The Read-Aloud Test

Here is the test that has saved more reports than any grammar checker ever built: read the document out loud. Not silently. Not in your head. Actually, physically, out loud, at normal speaking volume, the way you would if you were presenting it at a meeting.

Three things happen when you read aloud. First, you hear every filler word, every double negative, every awkward transition, every sentence that’s too long to say in one breath—your body tells you before your brain does, because you run out of air. Second, parallel-construction errors become audible, because they literally trip your tongue. Third, you catch words you meant to type but didn’t, because your eye fills in the blank silently but your mouth can’t.

Oluchi reads all 87 pages of the Crestwater report out loud Thursday morning, sitting alone at the lab’s conference-room table, starting at 6:30 a.m. It takes her two hours and forty minutes. In that time, she finds eleven more problems her eyes had missed on three silent read-throughs. The read-aloud test is not glamorous. It is not optional.

The “Is It Professional?” Test

When revising your document with attention to detail, you need to ask: Is it professional? If a document is too emphatic, it may seem like cheerleading. If it uses too much jargon, it may be appropriate for specialists but may limit access to information by a nontechnical audience. If the document appears too simplistic, it may seem to be “talking down” to the audience, treating readers more like children than adults. Does your document professionally represent you and your organization? Will you be proud of the work a year from now? Does it accomplish its mission, stated objectives, and the audience’s expectations? Business writing isn’t expository, wordy, or decorative, and the presence of these traits may obscure meaning. Business writing is professional, respectful, and clearly communicates a message with minimal breakdown.

Reflection Write: Your Favorite Failure Mode

Writers tend to fail in predictable ways. Some of us write long sentences when we’re anxious. Some of us hide behind passive voice when we don’t want to name who did what. Some of us lean on clichés when we don’t trust our own words. Some of us over-qualify when we’re afraid of being wrong.

Take five minutes and write a short paragraph answering two questions: What is your default failure mode in writing—the one that shows up when you’re tired, rushed, or anxious? And how do you usually catch it in revision?

Keep this paragraph. Tape it to your monitor if you want. Knowing your own pattern is the first move toward catching it, and it’s the one move no grammar checker can make for you.

Twelve strategies is a lot to hold in your head during any single revision pass. You don’t need to. Experienced writers run multiple passes—one for long sentences, one for obscured verbs, one for parallel construction—and accept that one pass won’t catch everything the next pass will. The twelve strategies are a menu, not a checklist you complete in one sitting.

Key Takeaways

Revising for style can increase a document’s clarity, conciseness, and professionalism.

Exercises

  1. Which of the following sentences are examples of good business writing in standard English? For sentences needing improvement, make revisions as you see fit and explain what was wrong with the original sentence. Discuss your results with classmates.
    1. Caitlin likes gardening, golfing, hiking, and to swim.
    2. At any given point in time, well, there is a possibility that we could, like, be called upon for help.
    3. The evaluation of writing can be done through the examination and modification of each sentence.
    4. While in the meeting, the fire alarm rang.
    5. Children benefit from getting enough sleep, eating a balanced diet, and outdoor playtime.
    6. Yee has asked us to maximize the department’s ka-ching by enhancing the bling-bling of our merchandise; if we fail to do this the darn president may put the kibosh on our project.
    7. Ortega’s memo stated in no uncertain terms that all employees need to arrive for work on time every day.
    8. Although there are many challenges in today’s market and stock values have dropped considerably since last year, but we can hope to benefit from strategic thinking and careful decision making.
    9. If you are unable to attend the meeting, please let Steve or I know as soon as possible.
    10. One of the shipping containers are open.
  2. Find a good example of effective business writing, review it, and share it with classmates.
  3. Find a bad example of effective business writing, review it, and share it with classmates.
  4. Revision requires attention to detail, and you may be under pressure to produce quality results within a deadline. How do you communicate your need for revision time to those who are waiting on you to complete the document? Share and discuss your responses with classmates.

7.4 Evaluating the Work of Others

Learning Objectives

  1. Describe five elements of critical analysis to use in evaluating someone else’s writing.
  2. Demonstrate how to deliver an evaluation constructively and respectfully.
  3. Explain the difference between “you” statements and “I” statements when giving feedback, and why the distinction matters.
  4. Describe how phrasing a critique as a question can open dialogue instead of closing it.
  5. Identify situations in which a critic is obligated to speak up even when the author outranks them.

As an experienced business writer, you may be called upon to review others’ work. Having a clear understanding of the process helps you be efficient in your review, producing constructive advice that benefits the essay while resisting change for change’s sake.

Five Steps in Evaluation

By following orderly steps, you can increase the likelihood that your evaluation of someone else’s writing will be fair, constructive, and useful. Here are the five steps:

  1. Understand the assignment.
  2. Evaluate how well the writing carries out the assignment.
  3. Evaluate assertions.
  4. Check facts.
  5. Look for errors.

First, review the instructions given to the writer. Make sure you understand the assignment and the target audience. What resources did the writer have access to, and how much time was allotted for completing the assignment? What purpose did the document need to fulfill, and what role will it have in future business activities or decisions?

Second, evaluate how well the document fulfills its stated goals. As a reader, do you see the goals carried out? If you didn’t know the writer and found the document next year in a file while searching for information, would it provide what it aims to convey? For example, suppose the document refers to the sales history of the past five years. Does the writer provide the sales history for the reader’s reference, or indicate where the reader can get this information?

Evaluate the assertions made in the document. An assertion is a declaration, statement, or claim of fact. Suppose the writer indicates that the sales history for the past five years is a significant factor. Does the writer explain why this history is significant? Is the explanation logical and sufficient?

Evaluate the facts cited in the document. Does the writer credit sources for facts, statistics, and numbers? For example, suppose the writer mentions that the population of the United States is approximately three hundred million. Obviously, the writer didn’t count all U.S. residents to arrive at this number. Where did it come from? If you have access to sources where you can independently verify these details, look them up and note any discrepancies.

Finally, check the document for proper format and errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Word processing spell checkers don’t catch all errors.

Delivering the Evaluation

If you’re asked to evaluate someone else’s written work, keep in mind that not everyone can separate process from product, or product from personality. Many authors, particularly those new to writing, see the written word as an extension of self. To help the recipient receive your evaluation as professional advice rather than personal criticism, use strategies to be tactful and diplomatic.

Until you know the author and have an established relationship, it’s best to use “I” statements, as in “I find this sentence difficult to understand.” The sentence emphasizes the speaker rather than the sentence, and further distances the author from the sentence. If you were to say, “This sentence is awful,” all the author may hear is “I am an awful writer” and fail to pay attention to your message, the sentence under examination, or ways to improve it. Business writing produces products, and all products can be improved—but not all authors can separate messenger from message.

Avoid using “you” in your evaluation, oral or written, as it can put the recipient on the defensive. This inhibits listening and decreases the probability of effective communication.[5] Phrasing an evaluation point as “Why did you include this word here?” can be interpreted as a personal attack. Just as speakers are often quite self-conscious of their public speaking abilities, writers are often quite attached to their work. Anticipating and respecting this relationship—and the anxiety it sometimes carries—can help you serve as a better evaluator.

Phrasing disagreement as a question is often an effective response strategy. Let’s rephrase that previous question to “What is this sentence intended to communicate?” This emphasizes the sentence, not the author, and allows for dialogue. Phrasing your evaluation as a question emphasizes your need to understand and provides the author space to respond collaboratively.

Focus on the document as a product, an “it,” and avoid associating the authors with it. Sometimes social rank or status requires respectful consideration, and choosing to focus on the document as a work in progress, distinct from the authors themselves, can serve you well. This also means that sometimes you may notice a glaring error but be reluctant to challenge the author directly, anticipating a less than collaborative response. By treating the document as a product and focusing on ways to strengthen it—keeping our goals of clear and concise as reference points—you can approach issues without involving personalities.

Case Connection: Oluchi’s 7 a.m. Email

Here’s the email Oluchi sent Waverly at 7:03 Wednesday morning, after throwing away three previous drafts:

Waverly—

I spent yesterday evening doing a close read of section 4 and I want to talk through it with you before Solveig gets back from Billings. Your methodology is solid and the science is right. The challenge I’m running into as a reader is pacing: I’m finding that several of the sentences are dense enough that I have to read them twice to catch the claim, and I know Kermit tends to read these reports in a single pass on the drive back from Helena.

Could we meet at the Pearl Street Bakery at 8:30? I’d like to work through section 4 together—I think we can keep the accuracy and cut about a third of the word count. I’ve flagged the specific spots I got stuck on.

Not a big deal. Bring a red pen.

—O

Count the I-statements. Count the times she says “you.” Count the places she phrases a problem as a question. Notice what she doesn’t say: she doesn’t say the section is bad, she doesn’t say it needs to be rewritten, she doesn’t say she’s worried about the contract, and she doesn’t say it’s a big deal. She says “I’m running into,” “I’m finding,” “I got stuck on.” She gives Waverly a location, a time, and a small action (bring a red pen) that transforms the meeting from “I’m in trouble” to “we have work to do.”

That email took Oluchi forty-five minutes to write. It was probably the most important forty-five minutes she spent all week.

Ethical Consideration: When to Speak Up Anyway

The tactful-evaluation rules in this section assume a situation where you have some authority or at least parity with the author. But what happens when the author outranks you, the document is about to go out, and there’s a serious error in it?

The short answer is: you speak up anyway, and you do it on the record.

A serious error is one that exposes the organization to legal liability, creates a material factual misrepresentation, or is likely to damage a real person (a misspelled name of a witness, an incorrect medication dosage, a wrong ruling citation). Tact is still useful—”I noticed something on page 34 I wanted to flag for your attention before this goes out”—but the speak-up is not optional. Your responsibility to the organization overrides your discomfort with the hierarchy.

Document that you raised it. Email, text, written memo. If the author chooses to ignore the flag, that is their decision to own, not yours. But if the error goes out unreported and someone later asks who knew, the answer should be “the author knew, because I told them on Wednesday at 4:12 p.m.” That’s the protection both you and the organization need.

Evaluating someone else’s writing is one of the most professionally useful skills a writer can develop, and it is also one of the most relational. You are not just fixing a document. You are managing an author’s trust in you, an organization’s trust in the document, and your own credibility as a reader. The five-step method keeps your evaluation structurally sound. The tact strategies keep it survivable for the author. Both are required.

Key Takeaways

When evaluating the work of others, make sure you understand the assignment, evaluate how well the writing carries out the assignment, evaluate assertions, check facts, and watch for errors. Deliver your evaluation with tact and diplomacy.

Exercises

  1. Select a piece of writing from a website, book, newspaper, or magazine. Imagine that you’re delivering an evaluation to the author. Using the strategies in this section, write a tactful and diplomatic critique. Your instructor may choose to make this a class exercise, asking students to exchange papers and evaluate each other’s writing.
  2. Select a piece of writing from a website, book, newspaper, or magazine. Imagine you’re editing it to half its original length. Share the article and your revised copy with classmates.
  3. What responsibility do you have to point out the need for correction in a document when the author or team leader outranks you at work? Does it make a difference if you anticipate they’ll take feedback negatively? How do you reconcile these concerns with your responsibility to the organization? Share and discuss your responses with classmates.

7.5 Proofreading and Design Evaluation

Learning Objectives

  1. Understand the difference between revising and proofreading, and how to use proofreading marks.
  2. Describe six design elements for evaluation.
  3. Distinguish between serif and sans serif typefaces and explain when each is appropriate.
  4. Apply the framing and white-space principles to evaluate a printed or digital document.
  5. Identify common design errors such as orphaned figures, inconsistent justification, and overused emphasis.

In traditional publishing, proofreading and design are the final stages a book undergoes before publication. If the earlier steps of research, organizing, writing, revising, and formatting have been done carefully, proofreading and design should go smoothly. Now isn’t the time to go back and revise content or experiment with format changes. Instead, focus on catching any typographical errors that slipped through revision, and “pouring” the format into a design that will enhance the writer’s message.

Proofreading

By now, you’ve completed a general and specific review of the document with attention to detail. You may have made changes, and most word processing programs let you track those changes across several versions and authors.

If you work in an environment where a document exists as a hard copy during revision, you may use or see handwritten proofreading symbols. Professional proofreaders often use standard markings that indicate where changes need to be made on a physical document. Some word processing programs incorporate many proofreading symbols in their menus. It’s helpful to be familiar with the various proofreading marks traditionally used to review and revise hard copy documents. Even if you never use the symbols, your awareness of them—and the points of emphasis under review—will serve you well. Do you need to insert a word, delete a word, capitalize a letter, or start a new paragraph? There are specific symbols for each of these actions because the review and revision process has common, consistent elements that need addressing.

Design Evaluation

If you’re asked to review a document, design is an element that deserves consideration. While most of our attention has focused on words—sentence construction and common errors—design can have a strong impact on how information is represented and presented.

Framing

Framing refers to how information is presented, including margins, line justifications, and template expectations. Just as a frame creates a border around a painting, highlighting part of the image while hiding the margins, the frame of a page influences how information is received. Margins create space around the edge and help draw attention to content. One-inch margins are standard, but differences in margin widths depend on assignment requirements. A brief letter, for example, may have margins as wide as two inches so the body fills the stationery in a more balanced fashion. Template expectations are distinct from audience expectations, though they’re often related. Most software programs have templates for basic documents, including letters, reports, and résumés.

Templates represent normative expectations for a specific document type. Templates have spaces establishing where a date should be indicated and where personal contact information should be represented. They also often allow you to “fill in the blank,” reflecting each document’s basic expectations of where information is presented.

For example, line justification refers to text alignment on the page. Letters often have left justification, lining up text on the left side while allowing the right side to be “ragged,” or not aligned. This creates even spaces between words and gives the appearance of organization while promoting white space—the space on the page free of text. Balance between text (often black) and white space creates contrast and allows for areas of emphasis. Left justification often produces the appearance of balance with evenly spaced words. In contrast, left and right justification can create significant gaps between words, making sentences appear awkward and hard to read.

Typefaces

Typeface refers to the design of symbols, including letters and numbers.[6] Creating the face of type, as in a typing machine or printing press, has long been both an art and a science. In past centuries, carvings in copperplate—where ink was applied and then pressed to paper—created intricate and intriguing images designed to communicate style, prestige, status, and formality through words and symbols. We no longer use copper or hot lead type, but typeface still exists as a medium for communication beyond the word itself.

There are two general categories of typeface: serif and sans serif. “Sans” means without, so the emphasis is on whether the typeface has a serif or not. A serif is a small cross line, often perpendicular to the letter stroke, that is decorative but also serves the useful purpose of differentiating characters that could otherwise look similar (e.g., “m” and “rn,” “d” and “cl,” or “3” and “8”). For this reason, serif typefaces like Times New Roman and Garamond are often easier to read, especially when font size is small. Sans serif fonts like Arial and Helvetica lack the serif and can be harder to read in long text sequences. They’re most commonly used for headings. However, when text is read electronically (on a screen), serifs can tend to break up, so sans serif typefaces can be a better choice.

The rule of thumb is to limit your document to two typefaces, contrasting sans serif (headings) with serif (text). Take care not to use a font that’s hard to read, creating an unnecessary barrier for your reader. Also, use a font that conveys the tone of your professional message to enhance effectiveness.

Paragraphs

Paragraphs are the basic organizational unit for presenting and emphasizing key points. Effective paragraphs can provide an emphasis strategy, but placement within the page can also influence recall and impact. The first point presented is often the second in importance, the second point is least important, and the third point in a series of three is often most important. People generally recall the last point presented and tend to forget or ignore content in the middle. Use this strategy to place your best point in the most appropriate location.

A lengthy document consisting of paragraph after paragraph can become monotonous, making reading a chore and obscuring key information that needs to stand out. For visual variety and to emphasize key information, consider these strategies:

  • Bullets
  • Numbers
  • Boldface
  • Italics
  • Underlining
  • Capitalization (all caps)

Remember, however, that using all caps for body text (as opposed to headings) is often considered rude, like shouting, particularly in electronic communications.

Visual Aids

If you have the luxury of including visual aids like graphics and pictures in your document, ensure that verbal and visual messages complement each other. The visual should illustrate the text and be placed near the words so that the relationship is immediately clear. Sometimes during editing, a photograph gets pushed to the next page, leaving the relevant text behind and creating discontinuity. This creates a barrier for your reader, so avoid it if possible.

Case Connection: Four Orphaned Brain Stems

One of the problems on Oluchi’s midnight list is four photographs of brain-stem tissue that drifted to the page after the paragraph discussing them. A reader encounters “Figure 4.2 shows the characteristic vacuolation pattern”—and then sees a different figure entirely, because Figure 4.2 has slid across a page break. The reader has to flip forward, lose the paragraph, find the figure, flip back, and resume. The paragraph loses half its meaning in the gap.

This is an invisible disaster. It’s not a spelling error. It’s not a grammar error. No reader will write an angry letter about it. They’ll just quietly stop trusting the document, stop reading as carefully, and make decisions on the basis of a weaker understanding than the author intended.

Oluchi fixes it Thursday morning by inserting a hard page break before the paragraph that introduces Figure 4.2, forcing the figure and the discussion onto the same spread. She loses twelve lines of white space and gains a coherent reader experience. This is a trade she makes without thinking.

Designing Interactive Documents

Documents increasingly have interactive components that can lead the reader in many directions. Providing links can facilitate interactivity, and the depth of resources can be a distinct advantage when writing documents for digital reading. However, be careful when integrating a web link—your audience may leave your message behind and not return. If you create a link associated with clicking on a photograph or icon, make sure the scroll-over message is clear and communicates whether the reader will leave the current page. As we’ve seen in many design elements, there are strengths and weaknesses associated with each option. It requires a skilled business writer to create and deliver a compelling message.

Real-World Application: The Emphasis Economy

Here is a rule that will serve you well for the rest of your career: emphasis is a budget. Every bold word, every italicized phrase, every bulleted list, every all-caps warning spends from the same limited pool of attention your reader has.

If one sentence in a document is bold, you have directed the reader’s eye to that sentence. If ten sentences are bold, you have directed the reader nowhere, because the reader’s eye has no hierarchy to follow. Bold everything and you’ve bolded nothing. The same is true for italics, underlines, capitalization, and colored highlights.

This rule is why experienced document designers look at a draft and cut emphasis rather than add it. Start every document assuming you have a budget of maybe three to five emphasis events per page. If you’re already at five, something has to give before you can add another. Oluchi finds the CWD report has 74 bolded phrases across 87 pages—nearly one per page, which is fine. Waverly’s section 4, by itself, has 31. Oluchi cuts it to four.

Proofreading and design are where a document stops being a draft and becomes an artifact. Every small choice at this stage—a typeface, a margin, a page break, a comma—affects how the reader experiences the content. Experienced writers don’t treat this stage as “polish.” They treat it as the last moment a careful reader can save the document from a mistake nobody would have caught otherwise.

Key Takeaways

Proofreading and design put the finishing touches on a completed document.

Exercises

1. Using proofreading marks, mark the errors in the following paragraph:

I never wanted to bacome a writer, but when I decidedon a career in sales, I found out that being able to write was a skill that would help me. So much of my daily work involved Writing that I sometimes thought i’d fallen asleep and woken up in someone else’s life. Messages, about actual sales, were the least of it. In order to attract customers, I have to send notes to people I already knew, asking them for sales leads. Then when I got a lead, I’ld write to the contact asking for a few munutes of their time.If I got to meet with them or even have a phote conversation, my next task was to write them a thank—you not. Oh, and the reports-I was always filing out reports; for my sales manager, tracking my progress with each customer and each lead. If someone had tell me how much writing sails would involve, I think I would of paid more attention to my writing courses en school.

2. With a writing assignment in draft form from your class, swap with a classmate and review the spelling, grammar, and punctuation, using proofreading marks where applicable.

Closing Case Analysis: Back to the Seventy-Two Hours

Oluchi Hjarnsdottir-Petrov spent the seventy-two hours between Tuesday midnight and Thursday afternoon working through almost every principle in this chapter. Here’s how her seventy-two hours mapped onto the four sections.

Tuesday night (7.1—General Revision): At 12:30 a.m. Oluchi stopped fixing errors and started sorting them. She put every item from her midnight list into one of the four general categories: content, organization, style, readability. The sort took forty minutes. When she was done, she had a map of the problem—and more importantly, she had a sequence. Content errors go first, because a readability fix to a sentence with a factual error is wasted work. Organization errors go second, because you can’t style-edit a paragraph that’s in the wrong place. Style and readability go third and fourth, because those are the layers that depend on everything else being right. At 1:15 a.m. she went to sleep. Solveig was right—not about the typo, but about the sleep.

Wednesday, 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. (7.2—Specific Revision): Oluchi ran the machine first. Spell-check caught forty-one items in eleven minutes. Then she opened the raw intake log and independently verified the sample count: 2,841, not 2,847. She fixed the header. She pulled up the 2023 Montana FWP cervid report and verified “Gallatin-Madison” letter by letter. She fixed three instances of “Madison-Galatin.” She rewrote the dangling modifier on page 34 by adding “Crestwater” as the subject and adjusting the verb tense. She scanned for the other common grammar errors on Jean Wyrick’s list—subject-verb agreement, split infinitives, double negatives, misplaced modifiers—and found eight more. She fixed all eight. By 11 a.m. she had cleared the specific-revision checkpoints for the two sections she had written. Section 4 was still Waverly’s.

Wednesday, 8:30 a.m. (7.4—Evaluating the Work of Others): This was the Pearl Street Bakery meeting. Oluchi arrived first. She ordered Waverly a cortado because she’d noticed Waverly always ordered cortados at lab meetings, and she didn’t want Waverly to have to make a decision before the hard conversation. When Waverly sat down, Oluchi opened her laptop to section 4 and said the sentence she’d rehearsed three times: “Your methodology is airtight. I want to work on the sentences together—I think you and I can make section 4 easier for Kermit to read without losing any of the science.” She used “I” statements. She asked questions (“What’s the most important thing this paragraph is supposed to communicate?”). She didn’t use “you” as a subject in any negative sentence. She treated section 4 as it, not you. And when Waverly said, halfway through the second coffee, “I think I was trying too hard to sound like I knew what I was doing,” Oluchi said, “Everyone does this the first time. I did the same thing on my first project. Let’s cut it together.” They worked until noon. Waverly went back to the lab and did the rewrite herself that afternoon.

Wednesday afternoon (7.3—Style Revisions): While Waverly rewrote section 4, Oluchi went through the executive summary and the two sections she owned, running the twelve style strategies as a menu. She counted conjunctions. She broke a 48-word sentence into two 24-word sentences. She replaced “through the consolidation of” with “consolidating.” She cut “in all certainty” and replaced it with “certainly.” She found three clichés that weren’t earning their keep and cut them. She ran through the passive-voice warnings and left four in place because they were appropriate to technical writing (the lab is the actor in the action, but the reader doesn’t need to be reminded every sentence) and rewrote six others into active voice. At 5 p.m. she and Waverly exchanged sections 4 and 2 for a peer cross-check. At 6:30 p.m. they stacked the pieces back together. The report was 83 pages now, down from 87.

Thursday, 6:30 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. (7.3 and 7.5—Read-Aloud and Proofread): Oluchi read all 83 pages out loud in the conference room. She caught eleven more problems her eyes had missed on three silent read-throughs: a missing word on page 19 (“surveillance [program] coverage”), a comma splice on page 51, two obscured verbs, a where-when ambiguity, three single/plural agreement errors, and two places where a colon worked better than an em dash. She fixed each one as she read. Her voice was hoarse by the end.

Thursday, 9:30 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. (7.5—Proofreading and Design): Oluchi ran the design pass. She forced the Figure 4.2 page break that kept the tissue photographs on the same spread as the paragraph discussing them. She did the same for Figures 4.5, 5.1, and 5.3. She audited the emphasis budget and cut the bold phrases in section 4 from 31 to four. She checked that the executive summary used one serif typeface for body text and one sans serif for headings (it did—Solveig’s house template). She verified that left justification was consistent across all 83 pages. She reviewed the table of contents line by line and corrected the “Madison-Galatin” that had persisted there from the table-of-contents auto-generation that had run before she fixed the section headers.

Thursday, 4:12 p.m. (handoff): Oluchi handed the final PDF to Solveig across the conference room table. Solveig scrolled through it on the projector for eleven minutes without saying anything. Then she closed the file and said, “Okay. Send it.” Oluchi sent it at 4:47 p.m.—thirty-six hours before the Friday deadline.

Wednesday the following week: Kermit Forsythe-Larraga’s review came back. Three small comments, all formatting. The contract renewed for three more years at $362,000—higher than the prior rate, because the report’s clarity and internal consistency, in Kermit’s words, “continues to make Crestwater one of the few labs whose reports I don’t have to rewrite in my head before I present them to the director.” Solveig printed that sentence out and taped it to the break-room refrigerator. She didn’t say anything about it. She didn’t have to.

Six months later: Waverly Tjirtanjana wrote the full surveillance methodology section for the midyear report. This time she wrote it in her own voice, cut her own long sentences as she went, and caught her own dangling modifier before the first read-through. Oluchi read it on a Sunday afternoon and found eleven things to comment on. Not a single one was a rewrite.

The principle Oluchi was operating under for all seventy-two hours is a principle worth holding on to, because it is the thing this chapter is really about. Revision isn’t about catching errors. Catching errors is table stakes—a spell checker can do that, badly. Revision is about protecting the people who trust the document, and protecting the people who wrote it. Those are not the same job. A good reviser does both at once.

Discussion Questions for the Closing Case

  1. Oluchi considered four options Tuesday night. Evaluate each option on two axes: short-term contract safety and long-term effect on Waverly’s development. Which option did she effectively choose (Option 4 as it emerged)? What made it different from the first three?
  2. Oluchi’s 7 a.m. email to Waverly used “I” statements throughout. Rewrite the same email using “you” statements and compare. How does the emotional register shift? How might Waverly have responded differently?
  3. The dangling modifier on page 34 was both a style error and, potentially, a legal ambiguity. Identify another situation—from your own experience, observation, or imagination—in which a small grammatical mistake could create a significant professional or legal consequence.
  4. Solveig’s rule was “Panic is just data you haven’t sorted yet.” How did sorting data by the four general revision categories (content, organization, style, readability) reduce Oluchi’s panic? Would you rearrange the categories into a different priority order? Why or why not?
  5. Consider the Ethical Consideration textbox on speaking up when the author outranks you. If Waverly had been the senior pathologist and Oluchi had been the new hire, how should the conversation have been different—if at all? What are the ethical obligations of a junior staff member who spots a serious error in a senior colleague’s work?
  6. The emphasis budget textbox pointed out that bolding everything is equivalent to bolding nothing. Apply this principle to a professional document you use regularly (a syllabus, a company memo, a policy document). Is the emphasis budget well-spent? Which items could be unbolded?

End-of-Chapter Review Questions

  1. What are the four general categories of revision described in section 7.1, and what does each category ask you to check?
  2. Why does the text argue that a quick scan is not sufficient for revision, even for short documents?
  3. What are the six specific revision checkpoints in section 7.2? In what order does the closing case suggest you should address them?
  4. Explain the comma splice error and two ways to correct it.
  5. Why is independent verification of facts often more useful than simply rechecking against the original source?
  6. Describe the difference between “its” and “it’s.” Why is this one of the most common apostrophe errors in business writing?
  7. What is a dangling modifier? Write an example and show how to fix it.
  8. What is a double negative? Why do English readers perceive it as illogical even when they can guess the intended meaning?
  9. List at least six of the twelve style-revision strategies in section 7.3.
  10. What is the “read-aloud test,” and what three kinds of errors does it reliably catch that silent reading often misses?
  11. What are the five steps in evaluating someone else’s writing?
  12. Why does the chapter recommend “I” statements over “you” statements when delivering an evaluation?

Matching Exercise: Key Terms

Match each term in the left column to its definition in the right column.

Term Definition
1. Content A. A grammatical pattern repeated consistently across items in a series
2. Organization B. A sentence error where two independent clauses are joined with only a comma
3. Style C. The substance of what a document says—the who, what, where, when, why, and how
4. Readability D. The order and structure of information within a document
5. Format E. Word choice and grammatical structures that give a document its voice
6. Independent verification F. The ease with which a reader can read and understand a document
7. Dangling modifier G. The design expectations of a particular document type, including margins, layout, and placement
8. Comma splice H. Decorative small cross-lines on letterforms that help distinguish similar characters
9. Parallel construction I. Confirming a fact against a source that does not share a history with the original source
10. Double negative J. A descriptive phrase with no clear subject, leaving the grammatical connection ambiguous
11. Split infinitive K. A construction in which two negatives cancel each other out and yield an unintended positive
12. Obscured verb L. An infinitive verb form with an adverb placed between “to” and the verb
13. Read-aloud test M. A verb converted into a noun by adding a suffix, which often weakens the sentence
14. “I” statement N. The practice of reading a draft out loud to catch filler, rhythm, and parallelism errors
15. Tact O. A feedback construction that centers the speaker’s experience rather than the author’s action
16. White space P. Diplomatic phrasing that softens evaluation without softening the underlying point
17. Serif Q. The space on a page not occupied by text, which contributes to visual balance and emphasis
18. Emphasis budget R. The limited pool of reader attention that bold, italics, underline, and caps draw from
19. Proofreading S. The final review stage focused on typographical and mechanical correctness, not content revision

Answer Key

1-C, 2-D, 3-E, 4-F, 5-G, 6-I, 7-J, 8-B, 9-A, 10-K, 11-L, 12-M, 13-N, 14-O, 15-P, 16-Q, 17-H, 18-R, 19-S

Application Exercises

  1. The Dangling-Modifier Hunt. Find a published document in your professional field—an annual report, a technical manual, a press release, a grant proposal, a government document. Read it carefully for dangling and misplaced modifiers. Find at least two and fix them. Write a short explanation of why each modifier was dangling, what the grammatical ambiguity was, and how your fix resolved it. If you can’t find any dangling modifiers, that’s also a finding worth reporting—what does it suggest about the revision culture of the organization that produced the document?
  2. The Waverly Rewrite. Take the 52-word sentence from section 4 in the Case Connection in 7.3 and rewrite it two different ways. Each rewrite should be no more than 30 words. One rewrite should prioritize technical accuracy for a specialist audience. The other should prioritize plain-English readability for a nonspecialist decision-maker like a county commissioner. Compare your two versions. What did each audience force you to give up or keep?
  3. The Evaluation Email. Imagine you are Oluchi and you need to send Waverly an evaluation email that is honest, kind, and urgent at the same time. Draft the email. Then swap drafts with a classmate and evaluate each other’s emails using the five-step evaluation method from section 7.4. Pay particular attention to I-statements versus you-statements, question phrasing versus command phrasing, and the treatment of the document as “it” rather than as “you.”

Discussion Questions

  1. Oluchi used the Tuesday night hours for sorting rather than fixing. In your own writing practice, do you sort before you fix, or do you fix as you go? Which approach seems likely to produce better results, and under what conditions?
  2. The chapter argues that “formal” and “hard to read” are different things, and that beginning professional writers often conflate them. Have you ever written something harder than it needed to be because you wanted to sound more professional? What did you learn from that experience?
  3. Consider the ethical considerations about speaking up when the author outranks you. Share a real or hypothetical situation in which you noticed a serious error in a document produced by someone more senior than you. What did you do, or what would you do? What would the consequences have been of not speaking up?

Extended Project: The Triple-Pass Revision

Select a document you’ve written in the past academic term or work quarter. It should be at least 1,200 words long and should represent real stakes—a class paper, a project proposal, a cover letter, a technical report, a grant application. Do not pick something you’ve already revised.

Run three distinct revision passes on the document. Each pass produces a separate, dated version.

Pass 1: General Revision (section 7.1). Read the document with only the four general categories in mind—content, organization, style, readability. Sort every problem you find into one of the four columns before you fix anything. Then fix content problems first, organization second, style third, readability fourth. Save this version as “Pass1-General.”

Pass 2: Specific Revision (section 7.2) and Style Revision (section 7.3). Run the six specific checkpoints (format, facts, names, spelling, punctuation, grammar) on the Pass 1 version. Then run at least six of the twelve style strategies from section 7.3. Read the document aloud as part of this pass. Save as “Pass2-Specific.”

Pass 3: Proofreading and Design (section 7.5). Run the final proofread on Pass 2. Verify the design elements—framing, typefaces, paragraph emphasis, visual aids if any, interactive elements if any. Audit the emphasis budget. Save as “Pass3-Final.”

Along with the three versions, write a 500–700 word reflection that answers: What did each pass catch that the previous pass missed? What was your most common failure mode? If you had to run only one pass in the future because you were under deadline pressure, which one would it be and why? How does your answer change if the document has higher stakes?

Self-Assessment: Back to “Before You Read”

Return to the four questions you answered at the start of this chapter. Re-answer each question now that you’ve worked through the chapter and the closing case. For each question, note what (if anything) changed in your answer.

  1. When you finish writing a draft, what’s your next move?
  2. How would you rank content, organization, style, and readability in order of importance for a business document going to a state agency?
  3. A colleague hands you a report section that’s factually correct but almost unreadable. What’s your first sentence to them when you deliver feedback?
  4. Does spell-check catch “major” for “mayor”? What does this tell you about the limits of automated tools?

Where your answers shifted, try to name the specific concept from the chapter that shifted them. Where your answers didn’t shift, that’s also useful—it means you were already thinking like a reviser on that question, and you can move faster on it in the future.

7.6 Additional Resources

Online Writing Laboratory (OWL) at Purdue University provides a comprehensive guide to the revision process. OWL is open access, free, and an excellent resource for any writer. Feel free to consult it anytime during our discussion to explore a grammatical point or writing tip in more depth. https://owl.purdue.edu/

Visit this YourDictionary.com page for a useful article about punctuation marks. https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/grammar

Visit this site for a useful list of irregular verbs in English. http://www.englishpage.com/irregularverbs/irregularverbs.html

Mignon Fogarty is the founder of the Quick and Dirty Tips network and creator of Grammar Girl, an excellent source. https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl/

EnglishClub.com is dedicated to English learners and those for whom English is a second language—but it can be useful for all of us. http://www.englishclub.com/grammar

The original (1918) edition of the famous style guide The Elements of Style is available online at Bartleby.com. http://www.bartleby.com/141

The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation is a concise, entertaining workbook and guide to English grammar, punctuation, and usage. https://www.grammarbook.com/

The Writers and Editors site presents an article on tact and tone in editing the work of others. http://www.writersandeditors.com/tips_on_tact_and_tone_30805.htm

The Chicago Manual of Style provides a chart of proofreader’s marks and their meanings. https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/help-tools/proofreading-marks.html

For in-depth information on presenting visuals effectively, visit the website of Edward Tufte, Professor Emeritus at Yale University, where he taught courses in statistical evidence, information design, and interface design. https://www.edwardtufte.com/online-course/

For articles and information about typefaces and other aspects of document design, explore the website of AIGA, the professional association for design. http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/about

The Hemingway Editor is a free browser-based tool that highlights long sentences, passive voice, adverbs, and hard-to-read constructions. It’s particularly useful as a second pair of eyes during style revision. https://hemingwayapp.com/

The Plain Language Action and Information Network, run by a group of federal employees, maintains a guide to plain-language writing for government and business. Its style advice aligns directly with many of the style-revision strategies in section 7.3. https://www.plainlanguage.gov/

  1. Strunk, W., Jr., & White, E. B. (1979). The elements of style (3rd ed.). Macmillian. ↵
  2. Wyrick, J. (2008). Steps to writing well (10th ed.). Boston, MA: Thomson Wadsworth. ↵
  3. Strunk, W., Jr., & White, E. B. (1979). The elements of style (3rd ed.). Macmillian. ↵
  4. McLean, S. (2005). The basics of interpersonal communication. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. ↵
  5. McLean, S. (2005). The basics of interpersonal communication. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. ↵
  6. Kostelnick, C., & Roberts, D. (1998). Designing visual language: Strategies for professional communicators. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. ↵

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