Some kind of fanatical word nerd, maybe, waving a red pen around, getting their glasses steamed up at the sight of every misplaced apostrophe or split infinitive? If so, I hope you’ll think again.
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We’re a misunderstood bunch. And I don’t mean that in a self-pitying way, just a mildly bemused one. Let’s tackle some of the top misconceptions about who we are, what we do and why we do it.

In the publishing world, people generally know that our work comes after the writing stage. In other walks of life, though, the distinction isn’t so well known. People often confuse us with copywriters, for example, perhaps partly because we’re sometimes known as copy-editors.​

Let’s clear this up, then. Editors and proofreaders work with stuff that has already been written. Some do also offer writing services, such as copywriting or technical writing – but these are separate services, needing different skills and expertise. Please don’t assume we can do that kind of work unless we say so.

It’s true that we’re traditionally linked to the publishing business, and this is largely where our working practices and standards were formulated. But we also do a great deal of work for other types of customer: businesses (other than the publishing type), public sector organisations, self-publishing authors, researchers and so on.
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There are respected editing and proofreading veterans out there who’ve never done a minute’s work for a publisher – there’s so much else that we can help with apart from books and academic journals. If something consists of written words and needs to be up to a good standard, we can lend a hand.

If only it were that simple. Well, come to think of it, that could get boring. Proofreading is essentially about correcting errors and inconsistencies, but even this goes well beyond looking for typing errors. There are also flaws in spelling, grammar, punctuation, referencing, editorial style, formatting and layout to be spotted and ironed out.

When we’re editing (or copy-editing) rather than proofreading, we go further. The exact scope varies from one job to the next, according to what’s needed – but it usually includes improving the clarity, readability and flow of the writing, making sure it’s suited to its purpose and the people who will read it, and checking for factual consistency.

Who would pay for that? This is a job – we’re providing a professional service. Nobody ever says, ‘We’re looking for someone to be pedantic about a 10,000-word report – how much would you charge for this?’

We don’t alter text just for the sake of following rules. We do it to improve people’s writing – to make it more effective, more powerful, more professional.

In a way, some of us are actually anti-pedantic. We encourage people to ignore zombie rules, and to see the English language as a fluid, ever-evolving thing that’s really based more on conventions than on cast-iron rules.
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On a similar note, our work is occasionally described as ‘a bit OCD’. Please don’t do this. As well as misrepresenting what we’re about, it trivialises a real illness that scars people’s lives. I’ll leave the rest to my colleague Denise Cowle.

If this were true, we’d be living pretty miserable lives. We might come across literally hundreds of the things in a single day, and can’t really afford to get worked up about them.
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I reckon most of us have become immune to those fits of anger that some people suffer when they see a spelling or grammatical mistake. We even stay fairly calm at the sight of a ‘should of’, or a ‘your’ that should be a ‘you’re’. It’s all in a day’s work, many times over.

A few years ago, I got into a bit of hot water on an editors’ page on Facebook. It had been flooded with posts that were basically saying ‘Ooh, look at this spelling mistake I’ve found – isn’t it terrible?’, drowning out the more interesting and helpful ones. I posted my objection to this – not worded as nicely as it could have been, but far from being insulting or abusive – and all hell broke loose (well, at least by editor standards).

I was surprised by the vehemence of those who criticised my comments. Then again, if I remember correctly, the post attracted 85 ‘likes’. I reckon most of the people who reacted to it were on my side. And I wonder how many of the peevers – and their defenders – were actual editors or proofreaders, rather than petty pedants who just saw that page as a good platform for indulging in their error-shaming habit.

I feel confident in saying that very few professional editors and proofreaders do this kind of thing. We spot errors because it’s part of our job – it isn’t a hobby.
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And the next time you hear about some zealot purging Wikipedia of an expression they disapprove of, or removing spurious apostrophes from signs, please don’t think of us.

This is true of some editors, especially those who specialise in fiction. And I’m sure this gives them some useful insight, helping them to advise their authors and enhance their manuscripts. Many of us don’t work with that kind of material, though.

It’s confession time. I’ve never read anything by Charles Dickens. Or Jane Austen. The only Shakespeare play I’ve read is the one we had to read at school. I could go on, but you probably get the idea.
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Now, I do enjoy reading. But it isn’t the biggest thing in my life, and I rarely read fiction or anything that could really be described as ‘literary’. And this isn’t a problem, work-wise, because that isn’t the kind of writing that I edit. I work on things like business reports, marketing content and non-fiction books. Horses for courses and all that.

Who needs an editor or proofreader when there are spell checkers (or, er, Editor, as the one in Microsoft Word is now unhelpfully called), Grammarly and other automated alternatives?
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It’s true that various software tools can help with improving text. Many of us use some of them ourselves, to make our work more reliable and efficient. Artificial intelligence is opening up new possibilities. But I still believe that it takes a human mind to assess writing effectively, and to make the right changes where needed – so that it’ll work well for the humans who’ll read it in the end, and for those who want them to read it. We’re not done yet.

On LinkedIn, I sometimes post tips on pitfalls to avoid in your writing, as a series of posts with the hashtag #WhatNotToWrite. Here comes a round-up of numbers 11 to 15 in the series.

The tips are mainly geared towards business writing, and are largely based on things I’ve noticed when editing business content – but some are worth bearing in mind when doing other types of writing as well.

The earlier posts were compiled into these blog articles:

• Parts 1 to 5
• Parts 6 to 10

❌ The company has a diversity policy in place.
❌ The company will put a diversity policy in place.
 
It’s abstract wording: the word ‘place’ doesn’t refer to an actual place. And abstract wording isn’t good for keeping your reader’s attention.
 
In the first example, it’s just pointless verbiage. Where else could the policy be, other than ‘in place’? It’s hardly likely to be floating above the clouds or buried underground. OK, so there might be a policy in draft form, not yet ‘live’ – but if that were the case, surely you’d say so. You can just leave out the ‘in place’, with no loss of meaning:
 
✅ The company has a diversity policy.
 
In the second case, you can’t just delete ‘in place’, as the verb ‘put’ would be left dangling in mid-air. But that’s abstract as well – there’s no actual ‘putting’ going on. Better to use a concrete, single-word verb, like this:
 
✅ The company will introduce a diversity policy.
 
As usual: keep it simple, stoopid! (I’m not calling you stoopid – it’s just an expression, stoopid.)
 
On LinkedIn: sorry, gone missing!

Let’s face it, unless you happen to be, say, a professional football club or the provider of a hugely popular product, it’s pretty unlikely that anyone will have set up an unofficial site about your organisation or product. Even if they had done, you probably wouldn’t mention it in your communications. And even if you did, surely you wouldn’t use the word ‘our’, as it wouldn’t be yours. So, ‘our website’ will do just fine.

This kind of thing can make you seem self-important, even though you might not be. And, like many other things I’ve discouraged in these posts, the word ‘official’ in this context is just needless clutter, giving your reader extra work to do. You have been officially warned 😏
 
On LinkedIn

It looks amateurish, and yet people keep doing it. The figure ‘3’ will ‘jump off the page’, distracting your reader and grabbing more attention than it warrants.
 
If you want to come across as professional and businesslike, it’s better to write ‘third party’, which will make for smoother reading.
 
This is part of a wider editorial style issue about when to write numbers using numerals and when to use words instead, which is too big a subject for a mere post like this …
 
On LinkedIn​

Here’s why:
⚠ It will make your writing look sloppy, untidy and disjointed.
⚠ Like other large characters, it ‘jumps off the page’, and this can be distracting.
⚠ It can make you look lazy, maybe even suggesting a certain disdain for the reader (‘I can’t be bothered to write “and”, so you’ll have to make do with this’). Even if neither of these things is true, it’s the perception that counts.
 
Using the word ‘and’ will hardly take any more time and effort anyway: it only needs one more keystroke.
 
As usual, there are exceptions. Here are some situations where it makes sense to use the ampersand:
✅ In official names of companies, brands etc. that do include it, such as ‘Ernst & Young’ and ‘Procter & Gamble’.
✅ In well-known terms such as ‘M&A’ and ‘P&L’, and in lesser-known similar terms that you expect your readers to understand.
✅ In things like tables and charts, if space is very limited.

On LinkedIn

​People often use this expression in social media and other places online, but they very often spell the second word wrongly: it should be ‘peek’. A ‘peak’ is the highest point of something, like a mountain peak, or the peak of your career. A ‘peek’ is a quick look.
 
It’s easy to get this wrong because of the ‘eak’ in ‘sneak’ – it just seems obvious that the next word should follow suit, but that isn’t the case.
 
Now you can be one of the special few who get it right. ✅

On LinkedIn

Let’s look at how capitals are normally used, how they’re often misused, and what difference it actually makes.

​Here’s a round-up of the main types of words that should be capitalised (in other words, they should start with a capital) if we follow normal conventions. It isn’t meant to include every possibility; for something more complete, you can turn to an authority on editorial style, such as New Hart’s Rules, Butcher’s Copy-editing or the Chicago Manual of Style.

We usually should capitalise:

• the first word in a sentence
• names of specific people, places, geographical features, organisations, institutions, products and services
• names of days, months, festivals, holidays, events and historical periods
• significant words in titles of works (such as books, films and songs), laws, official documents, honours and awards
• names for the peoples of specific countries, regions, ancestries and so on.

In informal writing, words that should be capitalised frequently aren’t. But – honestly – we editors and proofreaders are not the grammar police (or even the Grammar Police), and that kind of writing isn’t really our concern.
 
In material that’s written for business or public information purposes, I’ve found that the more common problem is overuse of capitals.
 
Here are some things that people often capitalise needlessly, with examples:

• skills and types of work (‘her experience in Project Management’)
• subject areas (‘a good knowledge of Economics’) – though it’s fine to capitalise the subject name of a specific educational course or qualification: for example, ‘a BSc in Chemistry’
• industries and business sectors (‘the Health Sector’)
• sports (‘he enjoys playing Tennis and Golf’)
• words that appear just after words that should be capitalised (‘the British Media’)
• words that are often correctly capitalised within titles, perhaps making people think they should always be written that way (‘in this County’, ‘a University degree’, ‘she called the Police’)
• things that the writer considers important, or wants to emphasise (‘we value our Employees’)
• seasons of the year (‘in the Spring’)
• terms that are often shortened to capital initials (‘Key Performance Indicators’, aka ‘KPIs’) – this doesn’t mean we should also capitalise them when spelling them out.

​I looked at some of the likely reasons behind this in an earlier post, ‘Writing tips: Hypercapitalisation – why do we do it?’

As with many aspects of written English, there are grey areas. This is where style choices and context come into play. Here are a few of them (a competent editor can help you with the rest, and with the details):

• titles of jobs and ranks
• headings, headlines and article titles: title case or sentence case?
• the first word of each item in a list or table
• references to chapters, figures and so on (‘see Chapter 4’ or ‘see chapter 4’?)
• compass points in mentions of unofficial areas or regions (‘western Europe’ or ‘Western Europe’?).

In these cases, consistency is key, along with thinking about how formal the writing should be and who it’s aimed at. Here’s my recommended rule of thumb: if you’re in doubt after giving it due consideration, use lower case. Also, don’t use capitals as a way of trying to impress the reader – it might well have the opposite effect ...

Capitals stand out. This is basically why we use them: to signify the start of a sentence, to distinguish someone’s name from the ‘ordinary’ words around it, and so on.

The downside of this is that they’re obtrusive. They divert the reader’s attention away from other letters, clutter up the page and disrupt the flow of the text.

Imagine your reader’s reading experience as a car journey. When they reach the end of it, you hope they will have absorbed your message and will be ready to do what you want them to. Each capital letter will be a bump in the road, making the journey less smooth than you’d like it to be. Or, as Jakki Bendell puts it in ‘The Seven Deadly Writing Sins’ on the ICE Training website, a cluster of capitals in nearby words can look ‘like a row of telegraph poles’.

Unnecessary capitals can also have a jarring effect on the reader, and make the writing look pompous, self-important and not particularly professional.

Unexpected lower-case letters can be distracting as well. If a reader comes across something like ‘the duke of Cambridge’, they might pause for a moment and wonder whether that should be ‘Duke’. Some style guides do recommend this kind of usage, but there’s a risk that some readers will find it amateurish. (Back on the driving analogy for a moment: let’s think of this as a pothole.)

Finally, as well as making the reader pause awkwardly and wonder about the writer’s or organisation’s credibility, either type of mistake can cause genuine confusion. For example, ‘Office software’ seems to mean the Microsoft suite that includes Word and Excel, whereas ‘office software’ looks like a more general reference to software that’s used for office work.

So, I hope I’ve convinced you that capitalisation choices do make a difference, and that it’s worth getting your writing thoroughly checked to make sure those choices have been made wisely. That will help your readers to focus on what you’re saying rather than how you’re saying it – this, I think, is largely what editing is about.

If you’ve used a freelance editor or proofreader* to help improve something you’ve written, how can you assess the quality and professionalism of their work?

(* As in my previous post: to keep things simple, I’ll just use the words ‘editor’, ‘editing’ etc., even though the actual work might be proofreading.)

You may not have the time or the expertise to check every detail of what the editor has done (and not done), but there are still some key points that you can consider. Some of these arise before or during the job, but I’ll be mainly focusing on what you should get back from the editor at the end.

If you want help with finding an editor in the first place, here’s an earlier article about this.

A lot depends on what type of customer you are. Publishing companies usually know what to expect from us, as editorial work is an integral part of their business. Self-publishing authors often aren’t so sure, but this isn’t really my area. So, this article’s main emphasis is on the needs of non-publishing customers, such as businesses and public-sector organisations.

I don’t want to be overly prescriptive, as there are different ways to produce good results – but I hope this will be useful as a general guide to what you should look for. For a more detailed breakdown of what an editor should do, you could take a look at the relevant parts of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading’s code of practice.

At all stages, you should expect the editor to behave as a professional service provider – not as a hobbyist or someone who ‘just does a bit of proofreading’. Now let’s go into detail.

Both you and your editor should make sure you have a clear agreement on:

• the scope of work (in other words, exactly which material they should check)
• the level of editing needed (for example, high-level copy-editing or just basic proofreading)
• how the editor should make or indicate changes
• how the editor should provide notes and queries
• the deliverables (perhaps including a style sheet as well as the edited content)
• the timeframe
• the fee or pay rate, and any conditions attached to it
• any requirements regarding editorial style (such as UK vs US English, or single vs double quotes).

This is all part of the process of getting a quote to begin with, as explained in my previous blog post.

While the work is in progress, the editor should:

• keep you up to date with progress to an appropriate degree, depending on the length and time-criticality of the job (if it’s only going to take a day or two, there might not be any need for updates, provided that the work is going according to plan) 
• let you know of any major issues, including any that might lead to a delayed completion (which they should explain)
• raise any major queries that arise
• avoid wasting your time with minor queries, or anything else that can wait until handover time.

First of all, the editor should have stuck to your agreement on the scope of work, level of editing, methods to be used, editorial style and so on.

You should find that the resulting text makes sense, at the very least. If appropriate, depending on the level of editing that you agreed on, it also should make for smooth, easy reading, with a professional ‘look and feel’.

If you think the editor has missed or created an error, it’s worth considering whether it really is an error. Some things that some people regard as errors are actually just style choices, such as splitting an infinitive, or using ‘they’ in the singular sense. If you’re unsure, you can ask the editor for clarification, or do some research into the current conventions and common usage.

It helps if the editor draws your attention to any style decisions that might be contentious, using either comments in the document or a style sheet. Also, they should have ensured consistency in these matters. However, some variations that look like inconsistencies to a non-editorial eye might be perfectly valid. For example, it’s normal practice to use a hyphen in ‘a long-term plan’, but not in ‘for the long term’ (as explained on The Editor's Blog).

If the editor has been working on a Word document and using Track Changes, their use of change tracking should be sensible and suited to your needs: neither too little nor too much. Any minor, indisputable changes, such as eliminating double spaces or fixing obvious typos, shouldn’t be tracked unless it’s been agreed that you need to see all changes. On the other hand, any changes that you might need to check, or at least be aware of, should be tracked.

The editor should have provided notes and queries where appropriate, expressing them in a clear, concise and helpful way.

Any changes that could significantly alter the meaning of the text should be brought to your attention, with notes to explain them and/or queries to ask for your confirmation. This also applies to facts, and to the spelling of the names of people, organisations, products, places and so on.

The editor should have taken account of the nature, purpose and tone of your written material, and its target readers. For example, if it’s aimed at readers from a wide range of educational and work backgrounds, the editor shouldn’t have introduced specialist terms or complicated wording.

Where appropriate, your editor should have considered how their changes could affect things like the length, layout and appearance of the material. It isn’t all about words – we should think about the overall finished product.

Finally, the editor shouldn’t have made rash assumptions about your level of expertise in Word, Adobe Acrobat or whatever software you’ll be using to review and follow up on their work. Because we know how to use things like Track Changes and comments in Word, or the Adobe Acrobat commenting tools, we can easily make the mistake of assuming you know as much about them as we do. We should avoid falling into this trap, and be ready to help you.

Having said all this, please allow for the occasional slip-up by your editor – we’re only human.

Whether or not you think your editor has got everything right, it’s always helpful if you give them some feedback after reviewing their work. We should never take it for granted that we’ve got it all worked out, and we should remember that every customer has different needs. And if you’re thinking of hiring the same editor again in the future, this feedback just might benefit you as well, by helping the editor to get a better understanding of what you need.

If you hire a freelancer to edit or proofread your written work, how much will they charge?

There’s no simple answer, but there are some things you can do to help make sure you’ll get meaningful quotes. Otherwise, you may get quotes that are higher than they need to be (which means you’ll either overpay, or turn down a suitable editor who could have done the job for less). Or you may run into problems later, as it turns out that your chosen editor has badly underestimated the amount of work needed.

Here are some pointers to guide you on your way.

By the way, if you’re looking for tips on finding a suitable editor or proofreader in the first place, here's an article I wrote about this a while ago.

One of the basic things to agree on is whether you’ll be charged a fixed fee or an hourly rate. Even with a fixed fee, the editor* will probably estimate the number of hours the work will take and multiply this by the hourly rate they want. So, either way, the level of hourly payment that each editor is looking for will be a factor.

You’ll also need to give the editor some information to help them gauge how long it will take to do the work. If the fee is going to be a fixed one, this will obviously help to determine it. Even if you’re going to pay by the hour, a rough work estimate will give you some idea of how much you’ll pay and how soon the work can be completed. It’ll also help the editor to judge whether they can fit the job into their schedule. (Yes, I know, some of this is obvious – but I couldn’t really leave it out.) Your own scheduling requirements also might affect the fee or rate that the editor will quote.

​Now let’s look at this in detail.

Which is it to be? If the scope of the work is fairly clear, a fixed fee is probably in the best interests of both parties, as you’ll know how much money will change hands from the outset.

But if there’s some doubt about how much material needs to be edited, an hourly rate might be more sensible. You could try to agree on a limit to the number of hours, and what should happen if, later on, this doesn’t look like being enough for the agreed scope of work.

Or, if you’re expecting to give your editor a regular stream of small jobs, agreeing on a fee for each job might mean you’ll both spend too much time discussing quotes (perhaps sometimes delaying the work); and then there’s all the extra invoicing, record-keeping and other paperwork. So, in these cases, using an hourly rate with monthly or quarterly invoicing may be more efficient all round.

There is no standard rate. Each editor will have their own desired rate in mind, or perhaps a range of rates for different types of work. A lot will depend on their levels of experience and expertise. The UK-based Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) publishes a set of suggested minimum rates, but the words ‘suggested’ and ‘minimum’ are both important here.

Different editors will have different questions to ask, according to the types of work they offer and how they prefer to produce estimates. For example, a fiction editor might want to know which genre your novel fits into. I don’t edit fiction, but I think the factors that I’m about to describe are fairly typical.

Crucially, you and the editor both need to have a clear understanding of the type of service that the editor will provide: for example, development editing, copy-editing, plain English editing or proofreading. Some of these terms aren’t commonly understood and are open to interpretation, and you’ll need to make sure you agree on exactly what the editor will do. This will influence how long the work will take; and, as mentioned already, it might affect the hourly rate.

As you might expect, the length of the material to be edited is a key factor. If possible, you should tell the editor how many words there will be, at least roughly. A page count isn’t normally very useful by itself, as the editor won’t know how many words an average page will have (and if you do know that, you can calculate the overall word count yourself).

Although an approximate word count will do, it should be a genuine estimate based on facts, rather than just a ‘finger in the air’ educated guess. Make sure it includes all the types of content that will need to be edited, not just the main text. If you’re developing the content in Word, it’s easy to see the current word count in your document, or each of your documents. Even if you’re still working on it when you’re looking for a quote, it makes sense to estimate carefully what the final count will be.

If you’re looking for someone to edit the written content of your website, getting a word count isn’t straightforward and can take a while. You may well need to create a list of pages (most likely using Excel), then copy the content of each page into Word in turn so that you can see how many words it has, and finally add these counts together. This list will be helpful for the prospective editors you get in touch with, though, especially if it includes the web address of each page.

As well as the length of the main text, other types of content can affect the amount of work needed, such as tables, illustrations, notes and references, if they need to be cross-checked with the main text and perhaps with each other. Make sure you tell the editor about these (if you want them to be checked, which is usually wise), and say roughly how many of each will be included. Also, if there are a lot of headings, especially with multiple levels, this will add to the complexity, as will frequent cross-referencing.

The type of material also makes a difference, along with its purpose and the target audience. For example, complex technical material generally takes longer to edit, per word, than something that’s been written in simple language for a wide readership.

If you need to the editor to follow a particular style guide, they’ll need to spend some time reading it, absorbing it and possibly changing their settings in some editorial software to reflect it. The more complex (and/or quirky) it is, the longer it will take to do the actual editing, because the editor will often need to pause and check that the text complies with it. On the other hand, a good style guide might save time, as the editor won’t need to spend so much time trying to work out your style preferences and, potentially, raising queries about them.

The format of the document (usually Word or PDF), and how it should be edited or marked up, usually won’t have a huge impact on the size of the job – at least if you don’t need anything out of the ordinary. But this will need to be agreed in advance anyway, and the editor is likely to bear it in mind when estimating the effort needed.

It’s also helpful to agree in advance on whether you’ll want the editor to do any follow-up work after the initial edit – for example, to help with resolving their queries after you’ve answered them. If so, and if you’re going to be charged a fixed fee, an estimate of this work could be factored into the quoted fee; or you could agree that it won’t be included in that fee, but will be billed additionally at an hourly rate.

Finally, but crucially, you usually should provide a sample of the content if you possibly can. This needs to be long enough to give the editor a useful impression of what the complete document will be like, particularly the style and quality of writing – perhaps something like 1,000 words. The sample also needs to be typical of the overall content, in terms of the type of language used and how carefully it’s been written and checked. However, a sample might not be necessary if the editor has worked on similar material for you before.

Some editors charge a premium for an urgent job. (Some might call it a ‘rush job’, but that might make you worry about how carefully they’ll do it.) Also, if your timeframe requires the editor to do some of the work at the weekend, on a public holiday or in the evening, they may well charge extra for that portion of it.

This might seem like a lot of information to give to your potential editors, but it’s worth the effort to help make sure you’ll get realistic quotes.

Rather than scrambling for answers each time an editor asks you these questions, why not prepare those answers before you start looking for quotes? You could save time by including this information in your initial query – it’ll be a good way to get a potential working relationship off to a smooth start.

In guidelines for ensuring plain, readable English, we’re often advised to prefer simple words. This mostly means preferring shorter words to longer ones, although we shouldn’t take this as an absolute rule. The words also should be well known to our readers. As Ernest Gowers put it in The Complete Plain Words, ‘If the choice is between two words that convey the writer’s meaning equally well, one short and familiar and the other long and unusual, of course the short and familiar should be preferred.’​

But what do we mean by ‘short’ words? In written language, the most obvious measure is the number of letters. However, the number of syllables also makes a difference to readability – perhaps even more so.

On average, of course, the more letters a word has, the more syllables it has; but there are glaring exceptions. For example, let’s compare two words with similar meanings: area and zone. Both are nice and compact on the page, with just four letters – but area has three syllables, compared with just one in zone. Which is more plain? You could argue that area wins the day because it’s more familiar, but it’s a close call.

​Here’s a pair of related words with an even bigger contrast: ideas and thoughts. The first word, again, has three times as many syllables as the second, but it has barely half as many letters. And then there’s myopia, which manages to pack four syllables into its six letters – just as many as the much more space-consuming (but better-known) alternative short-sightedness.

When we’re reading, most of us ‘say’ the words in our head. The more syllables there are in your writing, the more work your reader will need to do. If there are too many, it will take a long time for them to work through a sentence, and they might struggle to keep a handle on its overall meaning.
 
This, of course, is also an argument for keeping sentences short as well as words. In his Oxford Guide to Plain English, Martin Cutts warns that avoiding multisyllabic words isn’t always a good move, as it often means using more words. But if the syllable count per word is just one of the factors you look at, along with the word count per sentence, you will be dealing with that potential problem. Another useful measure is the number of syllables per sentence, which takes care of both of these factors to some extent.
 
Also, if there are too many single-syllable words, writing can seem monotonous and lacking in ‘colour’, with a staccato effect that might annoy the reader. A lot depends on the type of content and its target readership. For informational material aimed at a wide audience, some studies and guidelines suggest that an average of around 1.5 syllables per word is a good compromise between keeping it plain and keeping the reader awake.

​The length of a word, whether in terms of letters or syllables, isn’t the only thing that can affect its readability. If it has a cluster of consonants that are all pronounced individually – for example, in instigate, altruism or obstruct – this will slow the reader down as they read the text ‘out loud’ in their head. (This isn’t a problem in a word such as nightshirt – although it has five consonants in a row, they only make two sounds.)
 
Even where there’s only a pair of consonants, they might not go well together pronunciation-wise. This can have a slight jarring effect for the reader: for example, subpart and enmity.

​It’s interesting that the best-known readability tests are based on words per sentence and syllables per word, taking no account of the number of letters. Along with the average word count per sentence, the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level measures both use the average syllable count per word, while the Gunning Fog Index checks the percentage of ‘complex’ words. (A ‘complex’ word is defined as one with three or more syllables, excluding proper nouns, familiar jargon and compound terms. Common suffixes such as ‘-ed’ and ‘-ing’ aren’t included in the syllable count.)
 
These measures are only of limited value, especially as they take no account of what the words mean. But perhaps their emphasis on counting syllables is one of their strengths.

​There’s no magic wand that can ensure writing is plain and readable – a lot of factors come into play. But if you’re careful about how many syllables your words have, this will clearly help to make things go smoothly. It’s just one way of doing something that writers and editors should always do: thinking about the reader.

Over on LinkedIn, I’ve been posting some little tips on pitfalls to avoid in your writing, as a series of posts with the hashtag #WhatNotToWrite. A while ago, I packaged up the first five into this handy blog post. Now, here comes a round-up of numbers 6 to 10 (with some minor edits).

The tips are mainly geared towards business writing, and are largely based on things I’ve noticed when editing business content – but some are worth bearing in mind when doing other types of writing as well. Here we go, then …

A phrasal verb is usually a pair of words that represent ‘doing’ something: first a verb, then a preposition or adverb such as ‘in’ or ‘up’.

I’ve noticed this kind of thing a lot lately:

❌ Please log-in to your account.
❌ Sign-up for our newsletter!
❌ She mapped-out the way ahead.

Each of these hyphens is an unnecessary distraction, making the text more cluttered than it needs to be. Use a space instead, and the meaning will still be clear.

The same applies when using a similar phrase as an adjective that comes after a noun, for example:

❌ The customer was logged-in at the time.
❌ The data is fully backed-up.
❌ The formation was more spread-out.

But it’s different if you use this kind of phrase as a noun, or an adjective preceding a noun:

✅ There was a mix-up in the orders.
✅ Please go to the check-in desk.
✅ They used a more spread-out formation.

Here, the hyphen clarifies which words belong together, and how they fit into the sentence structure. Sometimes, though, especially in US English, it’s normal to use a single word such as ‘login’ or ‘setup’.

Rule of thumb: cut out (but don’t ‘cut-out’) the clutter when you can.

On LinkedIn

A few examples:

❌ circa
❌ moreover
❌ notwithstanding

OK, so people do sometimes say ‘circa’ together with a year: for example, ‘circa 1980’. But have you ever heard anyone say that a company has ‘circa 200 employees’? Probably not, but I often see this in business reports.

The trouble is that this kind of wording will make your writing appear stiff, stilted and unnatural. Your readers might well be jolted for a moment when they ‘hear’ one of these words in their head as they read it. Anything that would make them stop in their tracks – even for a split second – is best avoided, as it would distract them from the message you’re trying to get across.

There’s always a more familiar, natural-sounding alternative:

▶ circa → about, around, roughly, approximately
▶ moreover → and, also, additionally
▶ notwithstanding → despite, in spite of

So, why not use one of these instead? There might be times when those not-so-familiar words are appropriate because of the level of formality that’s needed. Unless you feel sure that this is the case, though, I suggest you steer clear of them.

On LinkedIn

Like this:

❌ the newly-formed company
❌ a widely-used method
❌ her carefully-written letter

This isn’t an absolute rule, but it’s a common convention that makes good sense.

Hyphens do have their uses. If the first word in an adjectival compound is itself an adjective, things can get confusing without a hyphen. It’s clear what a ‘black-cab driver’ is, but what exactly is a ‘black cab driver’?

But if they’re used where they’re not helpful, they’re just clutter, making the writing look ‘fussy’.

With adverbs ending in ‘ly’, I think it’s safe to say that there’s never any ambiguity without a hyphen:

✅ the newly formed company
✅ a widely used method
✅ her carefully written letter

In the first case, for example, we can’t be saying a ‘formed company’ is ‘newly’ – it wouldn’t mean anything. We clearly mean the ‘company’ is ‘newly formed’. A hyphen would just be a minor distraction, and we’re better off without it.

However, some adverbs don’t end in ‘ly’, such as ‘well’. These tend to be used differently, so this guideline doesn’t usually apply to them – this is a grey area, though …

On LinkedIn

An example:

❌❓ The company has a head office in London as well as regional offices in Birmingham and Leeds.

Now, I’ve flagged this with ❌❓ because it might be OK. If we expect the reader to be aware of the Birmingham and Leeds offices already, this is a conventional use of ‘as well as’, so there’s no problem.

But if that information is new to the reader, they’ll be wondering, ‘Should I already know about Birmingham and Leeds?’

I suspect that people tend to do this when they think ‘and’ would make for awkward reading, like it does here:

❓ The company has a head office in London and regional offices in Birmingham and Leeds.

This isn’t wrong, but it isn’t ideal either, as the double use of ‘and’ might cloud the meaning slightly. There are other fixes, though: you can add a comma before the first ‘and’, or use something like ‘along with’ or ‘together with’ instead (with or without a comma):

✔ The company has a head office in London, and regional offices in Birmingham and Leeds.
✔ The company has a head office in London along with regional offices in Birmingham and Leeds.
✔ The company has a head office in London, along with regional offices in Birmingham and Leeds.

Some reference sources say ‘as well as’ can mean the same thing as ‘and’. But why confuse your readers by using an expression with a double meaning?

On LinkedIn

I’ve seen this kind of thing in business writing:

❌ a turnover of USD 3 million
❌ a GBP500 fee

This is like writing ‘a flight to LHR’ when you mean a flight to Heathrow Airport. It gives the reader too much work to do. They’ll probably read these pieces of text as ‘U S D three million’ and ‘a G B P five hundred fee’. Nobody would say those things out loud, so they’ll ‘sound’ odd in the reader’s head.

It’s better to stick with convention:

✔ a turnover of $3 million
✔ a £500 fee

People will read these as ‘three million dollars’ and ‘a five hundred pound fee’. As the format is so familiar, they’ll be used to interpreting it that way.

If you need to clarify which country’s dollars they are, you could initially use ‘US$’, ‘C$’ etc. But this isn’t much more readable, and should only be done sparingly. Or you could put ‘US’, ‘Canadian’ etc. in brackets after the amount – this might not disrupt the flow so much.

OK, so these codes can be useful in stored data, and in tables, graphs etc. – but they don't work well in normal text.

Likewise for two-letter country codes: in normal text, it’s far better to write ‘Germany and Japan’ than ‘DE and JP’ – another dubious notation that I’ve come across lately.

On LinkedIn

The chances are that your organisation produces written material of some sort, such as:

• web content, blog posts
• newsletters, client magazines, press releases, leaflets, brochures
• business reports and reviews
• fact sheets, guidelines, policy documents.

​A style guide can help you to project a strong, coherent identity, with a consistent ‘look and feel’ to all this material, so it will get your message across smoothly. It can shape the style and tone of the writing, so it will resonate with your target readers.

If a number of people are involved in the writing and editing, or it’s done over a long period, there’s a bigger risk of inconsistencies creeping in. A documented house style, with someone to enforce it, can help to iron them out.

(A note for clarity: Style guides can also cover visual style, such as typefaces, colouring and page layouts. But here I’m just dealing with editorial style: that is, the use of words, numbers and punctuation.)

​It’s a set of guidelines, detailing an organisation’s preferences about various aspects of writing.

Many features of spelling, grammar, punctuation and so on aren’t governed by cast-iron ‘rules’. Instead, they have various conventions – or style choices – and you can decide which ones suit you best.

Here are some points that a typical style guide might deal with:

• Spelling: UK vs US, ‘-ise’ vs ‘-ize’ endings, ‘focused’ vs ‘focussed’, …
• When to use capitals, hyphens and italics
• Single vs double quotes
• Numbers: in figures vs words
• Date formats
• Grammar conventions – for example: active vs passive verb use, treating companies as singular or plural, singular ‘they’
• Lists: bullets vs numbers; use of capitals and punctuation
• Words and expressions that you prefer to use or to avoid
• Industry-specific terminology
• Titles of jobs, departments, products, services and even your organisation itself
• Sentence and paragraph lengths

​Publishers of books, magazines and newspapers typically have style guides, as do many other organisations, both private and public.

IdeaIly, the people who write the content in the first place should follow your style guide. In reality, though, they can easily get caught up in what they’re writing, and not pay enough attention to how they’re writing it.

So, once the writing has been done, it’s time for an editor or proofreader to check it. This is where your house style should be applied more faithfully, so that you’ll make the most of it.

You could write it yourself, but input from a professional editor or writer would be very useful. With the expertise they’ve built up from years of working on written material all day, they can keep your style guide in line with common conventions and good practice. They can also help you to tailor it to suit the purpose of your written material, and to its audience.
​
Alternatively, you could hire an editor or writer to create a draft version for you, which you could then review and change as you see fit. They could look through some of your existing material, identify your preferences, and pick out areas of inconsistency and potential improvement. Then they could put all this together to make a clear, well-organised set of guidelines to help ensure a smooth, consistent style in the future.

Your style guide could have separate sections for various types of content that you produce. For example, you’ll probably need a different style for business reports than for promotional leaflets.
​
Also, writing for the web and writing for printed material have different needs. And if you’re running an international operation, different forms of English, and perhaps different styles of writing, might best suit your various markets.

The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) has published a useful booklet, Your House Style: Styling your words for maximum impact, about the value of a style guide and how to create one. You can get it in printed or PDF form from the CiEP’s website here.

A crude swipe of the bat, moving across the line of the ball – possibly taking a chunk out of the pitch in the process, hence the agriculture link.

A term also used in baseball, meaning a delivery that whistles past the batsman’s head at an alarmingly close distance.

A delivery from a left-arm wrist spin bowler that pitches on a right-handed batsman’s off side (that is, to the bowler’s left side) and turns to the leg side; or vice versa for a left-handed batsman. Also known as left-arm unorthodox bowling.

​It’s thought to be named after Ellis ‘Puss’ Achong, a West Indies bowler of Chinese heritage who was an early exponent of it. In a 1933 Test at Old Trafford, as England’s Walter Robins was on his way back to the pavilion after Achong had had him stumped, he reportedly said, ‘Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman.’

​Other reports suggest the term was already in use long before then. It may have been based on the stereotypical view of the Chinese as being devious. Also, the general use of word Chinaman is widely considered derogatory. These factors might explain why the cricketing term isn’t so common in these (slightly) more enlightened times as it once was.

The area of the field between midwicket and wide long on – in other words, on the batsman’s leg side but quite some distance ahead. As it’s relatively unusual for shots to be played into this area, it’s been suggested that cows could safely graze there. When someone does manage to slog the ball in that direction, this is known as a cow shot.

The closing overs of an innings in a limited-overs match. Some bowlers are specialists in this phase of play, when the priority is usually to restrict scoring rather than to take wickets.

A unflattering term for slow-to-medium-paced bowling that doesn’t cause batsmen many problems.

A relatively new form of finger spin bowling, in which the ball turns in the opposite direction to what is expected. A doosra from a right-arm bowler pitches on a right-handed batsman’s leg side and turn to their off side, and vice versa for a left-arm bowler. (And, of course, double vice versa for a left-handed batsman.)
​
Pakistan’s Saqlain Mushtaq is credited with inventing the doosra in the 1990s. The term comes from a Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu word meaning ‘the second (other) one’.

Yet another type of deceptive spin delivery. Like the chinaman, it’s a wrist spin delivery that pitches on a right-handed batsman’s off side and turns to the leg side, which isn’t what they would usually expect; but it’s produced by a right-arm bowler.

Nobody seems to be sure where the word originated from. One theory is that it came about because the batsman ‘goggles’ in amazement over where the ball has ended up. Googly itself is also an adjective describing unfocused or rolling eyes.

A fielding position just outside the slip cordon, nearly level with the batsman. The name is derived from the narrow channel between the slips and the point position. I’d like to think that someone once caught Sourav Ganguly at gully off a googly, but sadly I can’t prove it.

A batsman’s unwanted feat of being dismissed for nought on their first ball (that’s a golden duck) in both innings of a match. Also known as a golden pair. A mere pair is when the batsman is out for no runs in both innings (just a duck), regardless of the number of balls faced.

An over where no runs are scored. The idea is that the bowling is ‘untouched’, like a traditionally virginal maiden (to paraphrase Madonna).

The controversial act of a bowler running out the batsman at the non-striking end, by stopping the run-up and breaking the wicket while the latter is backing up – that is, straying from the crease in order to get a head-start on a possible run (or through absent-mindedness). It’s named after India all-rounder Vinoo Mankad, who dismissed Australia’s Bill Brown this way in a 1947 Sydney test.

Whether it’s legal or not, mankading provokes heated debate over whether it’s within the all-important ‘​spirit of the game’. Since a law change in 2011, it can only happen if the bowler hasn’t yet started their delivery stride. There have been some recent high-profile mankadings, though, notably when Ravichandran Ashwin of Kings XI Punjab trapped Jos Buttler of Rajasthan Royals in an Indian Premier League match. It’s feared that a spate of them could sour relations in this year’s World Cup.

A score of 111 by either a team or a batsman, which is thought to be unlucky. Why Nelson? Well, Admiral Horatio Nelson supposedly ended his days with one arm, one eye and one leg (he didn’t, but let’s not worry about that).

Another marvellously evocative piece of lingo (see also dibbly-dobbly), meaning a gentle prodding of the ball by the batsman into a nearby gap in the field. Often preceded by ‘nudging and’.

A close relative of dibbly-dobbly. It means a purveyor of slowish, innocuous bowling, where the ball’s movement resembles that of a hurled pie. Not intended as a compliment. Just a thought, though: how easily could a batsman hit an actual pie to the boundary?

A lower-order batsman who is notoriously easy to dismiss. A rabbit needs to be a specialist bowler (or astounding wicketkeeper) to merit a place in the team. Also known as a bunny or walking wicket.

A batsman who’s even worse than a rabbit might be called a ferret or weasel: out in the wild, a ferret or weasel always goes in after the rabbits (geddit?).
​
The term rabbit or bunny is also often used for a batsman who has often been dismissed by a particular bowler – for example, ‘Mike Atherton was Glenn McGrath’s bunny.’

A fielding position on the batsman’s off side. The silliness lies in the fielder’s close proximity to the batman, putting him in danger of being walloped by a well-hit ball. See also silly mid-on, silly midwicket and silly point (not here, though).

The slightly strange thing about wicket is that it can mean so many things. Here we go:

1. Each set of stumps and bails at either end of the pitch – that is, the prepared strip of ground in the middle of the field. (To add to the confusion for newcomers, the field itself is often referred to as the pitch. Speaking of which …)

2. The pitch. People tend to call it the wicket when discussing its condition, hence sticky wicket.

3. The taking of a wicket is the dismissal of a batsman: ‘New Zealand soon took another wicket.’

4. The other side of that coin is a batsman losing his wicket (being dismissed), or a team losing wickets.

​See also wicketkeeper, midwicket, wicket maiden, last-wicket stand and so on.