Q: Is this right? The apostrophe on the acronym looks funny. But I don’t know how else to punctuate it… ‘Our company helps SMME’s to develop into fully independent companies.’ A: No, it isn’t. We don’t use apostrophes to make acronyms into plurals. It’s SMMEs. BUT another problem is that the ‘s’ should be small, and your text [...]
Q: Should all job titles be capitalised? What is the industry norm? A: I love this question! As a rule, job titles are not capitalised when they come after the person’s name. Like this: ‘John Smith was appointed director of the Industrial Business Unit in 2001. Prior to this, he was general manager of a mine in [...]
Q: Is it draftsperson or draughtsperson? Drafting or draughting? Draftsman or draughtsman? A: As far as I know, or can tell from the experts I consulted on this, ‘draughting’ is used in relation to people who do drawings, rather than those of us who draft documents; i.e. write words. The drawers are draughtspersons. But the [...]
Q: When working on documents I currently use two spaces after a full stop and one after a comma – is this incorrect or is it acceptable? A: Current global best practice is one space across the board – after a full stop (period) and after general in-text punctuation. Contemporary word processing does things so [...]
Here are the answers to some of the language and related questions I am regularly asked by clients, colleagues and the public: Q: Please tell me if the use of RSVP has changed? To my knowledge it is French for respond if you please, and I have never added ‘kindly’ or ‘please’ for that reason. [...]
