Great grammar for powerful blogging

If you want to enhance the power of your written message, it’s better to have great grammar. This also makes it an easier read for your audience. Whether you’re writing web copy, content articles, emails or blog posts. Here’s a quick grammar guide for your content:

Grammar tip: bullet points

Bullet points are saved for when you want to list things. The trick with bullet points, when it comes to grammar, are that they should comprise a complete continuous sentence, so only the last point should end with a full stop and each point should begin with a lower case letter.

The start of the sentence (preceding your bullet points) should end with a colon. I’ve supplied you with an example for your reading pleasure.
I love writing blog posts on:

  • grammar and punctuation
  • creative and copywriting
  • proofreading and editing.

Tip: bullet points add to the effectiveness of your SEO too.

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Grammar: headings

Don’t capitalise your title entirely and make sure you bold your sub headings for more power. Read up on how to write great headlines here.

Grammar: italics

Italics are reserved for titles of things such as books, movies, art etc and NOT for emphasising words as commonly mistaken. Cities, towns, companies and people’s names don’t require italics as it’s more reserved for artworks, such as my favourite movie Great Expectations.

Grammar: quotation marks

I use single quotation marks for quoting someone or referencing speech. I use double quotation marks for words that require emphasis or a word that is a colloquialism or made up.

Doing the opposite of this is still technically correct grammar in Australia but a lot more people are erring towards the way above. As long as you are pedantically consistent, then you will be okay.

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Grammar: numbers

When it comes to grammar, numbers under ten should be written in full and numbers from ten above can be written as numerals. However, if you have a number below ten and one from ten upwards in the same sentence, they both need to be written in full. Because I prefer consistency, I tend to write all my numbers in full unless they are specific to a title or name of something. For example, 911.

Grammar: cleaning up formatting

If you are like me (and probably most of the world) and you create your blog content initially in some kind of word processor (such as Word), there is an important step you must commit to memory! When you cut and paste your text from Word into your blog, you need to remember to strip all the formatting that Word automatically creates because it messes with the magic of the internets. I’ll be honest here and say that I have no idea why and being a web coder is for people who are far more intelligent and patient than I am. All I know is that it is quite important. So make sure you press the button that usually has a T on it in your toolbar. Don’t forget that you’ll have to manually add the formatting (bold, italics etc) once you’ve pasted the content into the blog post. Or you can use this to clean up your formatting.


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