Bull's Eye Business Writing Tips

Tip #405:  The word “hardly”...

These FREE weekly business writing tips
will help you improve your business writing.

Tip #405:  The word “hardly” is negative in meaning.  To preserve the negative meaning, do not use another negative with it.  

For example: 

Use:  You could hardly expect her to agree.
Do not use:  You couldn’t hardly expect her to agree.

Weekly Exercise:

We receive over 200 emails per day.  We encourage you to answer our weekly tips, but please, if you are answering this weekly tip exercise,  identify the tip number in the subject line of your email.

This week’s quiz:

Tell whether Madeline Santoro’s comment is correct and why:  

Wouldn't it be easier and be more in line with good parallel structure to repeat the preposition in these phrases- “respect for”  “as well as interest in”?

Comments on Tip #404:

Agustin Socarras commented:  

Here are some words that get me in trouble:

Pick/peak
to/two/too
basis/bases
Porpoise/purpose

Alvin Manz added:

see/sea; hear/here; sign/sine

Lucy Pacific added: 

root/route (depending on how you pronounce it, right?)
dessert/desert - as if you left someone, not the sandy dry place

Sandy had a huge list such as:

grease, Greece hole, whole
gnu, new plane, plain
would, wood so, sew
right, write board, bored
nee, knee awl, all
billed, build tale, tail

Comments on Tip #404:

Paige added some more abbreviations:

XYZ= examine your zipper PO = Post Office
PDQ= Pretty darn quick! FYI = For Your Information
SWAK = Sealed with a kiss BTW = By the way

e-mail:

TTFN= Ta-Ta for now AFK= Away from keyboard
BBL= be back later J/K = Just Kidding
IMHO=In my humble opinion

Cheryl Gelling added Re Abbreviations:  

In addition to: lol == laughing out loud, lol also stands for little 'ole ladies, an endearing term, really

Thanks to all of you who sent in abbreviations and homonyms.  Your response was great.

Quote of the week:

“I have found that if you love life, life will love you back!  (Arthur Rubenstein (1887-1982)

Answers to this week's quiz:

Madeline’s comment sounds good to me since you need to express parallel ideas in parallel form.

To send the above exercise answers to Gloria for her comments and review,  copy the questions,  paste  them into an email, answer them,  and send to Marsha@basic-learning.com.

 

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By Gloria Pincu, M.A. , President of Basic Learning Systems, Inc.
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Here are some books on business writing that I recommend.

Bull's Eye Business Writing is also available from Amazon.com.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, author, Lynne Truss The Everything Resume Book by Steven Graber
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction , by William Knowlton Zinsser  The Gregg Reference Manual, by William A. Sabin 
The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, White, E. B. White  How to Take the Fog Out of Business Writing, by Robert Gunning, Richard A. Kallan (Contributor) 

More books on business writing and other business subjects  (available from Amazon.com). 

Contact Gloria Pincu at Basic Learning Systems, Inc.

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