Give your company a voice
The red Mini pictured above is a little, used car – not necessarily a little-used car.
How well do you use hyphens? They look like a shorter, stubbier relative of the dash but perform a very different function.
In a nutshell, hyphens are commonly used to glue words together when no single word exists. Such as ‘on-site’, ‘stress-free’ or ‘mother-in-law’.
You can also use hyphens to form compound words with different meanings.
The colon – we’re talking the punctuation mark rather than the large intestine here – is often overlooked. Indeed, many never use it. But they’re missing a trick. Just as it’s possible to cook without salt or go through life without eating chocolate, a well-placed colon can pep up your writing.
Although under threat from the more popular dash, colons have many uses. For example to:
If your main use for semicolons is to create a winky face*, you’re not alone. It is perhaps the most underused of punctuation marks and this may well be due to confusion over its purpose and correct use. The simplest way of describing what a semicolon does is to signify a long pause. How long? The best answer I can give is somewhere between a comma and a full stop.
There are no precise guidelines and that is probably one of the reasons why they’re falling into disuse.
As this image humorously demonstrates, the comma is a vital punctuation mark. They can greatly improve our understanding of a sentence, particularly a longer one. If you’re confused about how to use commas correctly, their purpose is to subtly indicate a natural breathing space.
Here’s where a lack of commas can lead
One company that may now recognise the importance of correct punctuation is Southern Rail following this inadvertently honest exchange with a Twitter user,
Metaphors, similes, hyperbole, alliteration and wordplay are all techniques that, used judiciously, can liven up your writing. I’ll tackle each of them over the coming weeks and months, but let’s start with metaphors.
What exactly is a metaphor?
The dictionary definition is “something that describes a person or object by referring to something that is considered to have similar characteristics to that person or object”. For example, when we hear the phrase “crying a river of tears”,
