Category: Writing

After I mentioned in my blog yesterday that a friend had suggested that I consider taking a writing course, my friend and brother-in-law Tom wrote me a long email in which he related his experience with a writing course and mused about whether writing is something than can actually be taught. I spent a long time composing my reply and then realized that much of what I’d written might be worth posting here, so I’m cannibalizing my email to Tom for today’s post . . .

One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got came in a course on business writing that my company offered. This was a long time ago, but as I remember, the person who taught the course, Padraic Spence, had once worked as a reporter for a small newspaper. Every time he turned in a piece of copy, his editor expected to see a red dot over every word in the piece . . .

During the last few years that I was working, I began to notice that some of my colleagues who were otherwise careful and literate writers were omitting hyphens in their business writing. They would refer to “well established principles” or “a fifty year old building” with nary a hyphen in sight. I’m not sure why someone who wouldn’t think of writing “thats all there is” or “their he goes” saw nothing wrong with writing about a “state of the art system,” but it made me a little nuts . . .