Insights archive
Red Pony is a team of writers, editors, Microsoft Office template developers and communications trainers. We have been writing about our areas of expertise for over a decade in our Red Pony Express newsletter.
This collection features the best articles from the last 10 years.
Origins of punctuation
Regular readers will know that we’ve written a range of articles in the past about the purpose of different punctuation marks and how to use them in your writing. This time, I want to talk about the origins of punctuation itself.
The difference between copyediting and proofreading
When you’re outsourcing a content project, what services do you need and how do you tap into the right level of editorial expertise?
The costly consequences of typos
Make a point of proofreading your communications, always. Build in the time for it. If necessary, read your work aloud (or get Microsoft Word to do it for you). Another option is to change the font of your text to trick your mind into thinking the content is unfamiliar and fresh. Many simple errors can be caught this way.
What’s a project worth?
Lately I’ve been refining the tools we use to estimate the cost of writing, editing and proofreading projects. I thought I’d share with you some of the variables we use to predict the time a particular project will involve – which in turn determines the amount we quote.
Avoid embarrassment with five easy proofreading tips
Do you have a favourite typo? Enter ‘funny typos’ into Google and you’ll find a seemingly endless list of humorous malapropisms, spoonerisms, misspellings and grammatical errors.
Secrets of the editing trade
Have you ever wondered what an editor’s toolkit looks like? I thought it might be useful to examine some of the tricks of the trade that Red Pony editors use when reviewing your documents.
Spam, spam, spam, spam
The curse of spam is one with which every reader will be familiar. It’s now just one more daily task to eradicate the emails that slip past the spam filter of our email programs, usually playing on one or the other of the top two human desires: sex and money.
When your number’s up
There are different conventions that you can follow when presenting numbers and measurements in a document. There is no single correct method, but observing some generally accepted principles will make your documents clearer for the reader, and will present your organisation in a more professional light.
Is your website losing you business?
One of your first tasks when setting up a new business is to establish a website. Your internet presence is indispensible for advertising your products or services to the world. But what if your website is doing more harm than good?
Grammar at work – who cares?!
Put simply, when you dash off an email and send it as soon as you’ve typed the final character, without rereading it and checking for errors, you’re saying to your recipient, ‘You are not important to me’. This may be your intention, but if it isn’t, take a breath and read that message one more time before you hit ‘send’.
If you type two spaces after a full stop, you’re wrong!
Despite its prevalence, a double space at the end of a sentence is simply incorrect.
PerfectIt! editing software
PerfectIt! from Intelligent Editing claims to locate typos and grammatical errors in Microsoft Word documents – which is what the spell checker does already, I hear you say. Yes, this is true, but it also claims to detect other errors that ‘no spelling or grammar check will discover’. What they are talking about is consistency, which can be one of the biggest headache-sources for editors.
Why proofreading is not an optional extra
After all the hard work that goes into a project, if the documentation provided to the client contains spelling and grammatical errors, is poorly structured and generally difficult to read, it reflects badly on everyone involved, and the expense saved on proofreading may prove to be a greater cost in the long run.
Ask the punctuation doctor
While the correct use of en or em dashes can bring clarity to a sentence that contains a number of complicated, interconnected ideas, in a lot of cases it can be better to break such a long sentence down into shorter ones. As an exercise, this is worth trying. It can help you pare an idea down to its essentials and force the subsidiary material to justify its presence. Maybe you don’t need those parenthetical statements after all?
Episodes in the archaeology of spelling
Spelling in the English language can sometimes seem a very arbitrary proposition. Aside from the peculiarities within the language itself, there’s the long list of variations between US and British/Australian usage.
Using the spell-checker
How often has the spell-checker saved you from a blunder, typo or solecism? How often has it caused one?
Why you need a style guide
A style guide is a useful tool (and, for a professional organisation, an indispensable one) for establishing the acceptable writing style or tone of documents as well as their physical appearance.
Wielding the apostrophe
No single element of English usage produces such passionate outbursts as the correct use of the apostrophe. The commonest targets of grammarian wrath in this respect are greengrocers and signwriters—probably because their work is always on public display.