In my role as a Recruiter at Impact Advisors and in my new, expanded role as Social Media Manager, blog Editor-in-Chief, Website Analyst, Sales Support, Content Creator, and Staffing Support, or, as I like to joke, Lady Baglady, I write a lot. I mean, I write a lot a lot. I also edit other people’s writing a lot. It’s not rare that I’ll help edit a 14,000+ word RFP response or white papers or several blog posts per week. Writing is something I enjoy and therefore bad writing including grammatical errors, punctuation mistakes, and nonsensical content makes me cringe. Or perhaps rage.
Oh Twitter, texting, and Gchat what have you done to us? You’ve made punctuation optional and hashtags have replaced complete sentences. Alas, I miss the old days of proper English. I will admit, proper punctuation is harder to remember when much of our social interactions online don’t require it.
Fear not, dear readers! I have an answer to all your writing problems and questions such as, “Does the period go inside the quotation marks?” Check out Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab better known as the OWL. Hoot!
According to them, “The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects.” It’s free, reputable, and they use the Oxford Comma which is my favorite.
I use OWL quite a bit and I find it easily searchable and user friendly. I highly recommend it to writers at my firm, peers, and to you, dear readers. Thank you, OWL, and Go Boilermakers!
