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Worry-free Writing: how to use a semicolon

27/6/2016

How do I use a semicolon?

Last week I asked for suggestions for blog posts, and Kate asked about when to use a semicolon.

The semicolon is a really handy punctuation mark, but lots of people are a bit scared of it and so just avoid it altogether!

Let's take a quick rundown of the rules for using a semicolon – there are only two that you need to learn, so this won't take long.

What is a semicolon for?

Now you're asking yourself, 'When should I use a semicolon?'

Well, a semicolon has two functions in a sentence:

1 A semicolon separates two sections of a sentence which are closely linked.

It is used to show that although the sections (or clauses) are separate they have a connection. It can also be used when you want to further explain or expand on the statement in the first clause.

I don’t like tomatoes; I prefer a green salad.

It's OK to use a semicolon when:

the two sections could stand alone as complete sentences
you could replace the semi-colon with a full stop.

Using a comma instead of a semicolon in this instance would be considered incorrect; this is known as a comma splice. (See what I did there?)

Comma splices are sometimes allowed in fiction writing, where we can be a bit more lenient with grammar rules, but they are generally a no-no .

2 A semicolon can be used to separate the items in a list.

This is especially common when it could be confusing to use commas to separate the items, for example with a long list or when the list items themselves include commas.

The starters looked delicious: mozzarella, avocado and tomato salad; chicken satay skewers; sizzling chilli king prawns; and queen scallops with black pudding.

Notice that the list is introduced by a colon, and you mustn’t forget to use a semicolon before the final and.

So it's really quite straightforward – there are only ever two reasons to use the semicolon.

I hope that's cleared things up for you!

Over to you!

What do you think? Has that helped you get a better picture of when to use a semicolon?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and any suggestions you might have for other topics to include in my Worry-free Writing series.

If there's a grammar point you're not clear on, or a punctuation mark you're not sure about, drop in a comment below, or tweet me using the hashtag #WorryFreeWriting.

For my take on language and writing, and general musings on working for yourself, why not sign up to hear about updates to my blog?

As a thank you, you'll get a copy of my free ebook, Creating Your Style Sheet, to help you be more consistent in your writing.

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Working as a freelance editor - the next five years

21/6/2016

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Plans.

We all love a plan.

But there's no point in having a plan if you don't execute it.

Hitting the big 5 with my freelance life and attending TCMA2016 in the same week has made me think about how I want the next five years of my business to go.

I am the queen of the to-do list. Nothing gives me more satisfaction than sitting down with a lovely pen and a crisp sheet of paper and compiling a neat list, complete with headers, sub-headers, bullets, numbers, indents, colour coding – the whole caboodle (I know this is a weakness of many editors – we just love to order things).

And in my day-to-day working life, editing and proofreading, among other things, multi-component, multi-level education courses, the list gets referred to and satisfying little ticks (or big, relieved scoring-out lines) reassure me that I’m making progress towards my deadline.

The problem with not having accountability

Fortunately I don't have Douglas Adams's sanguine approach to deadlines!

Give me a deadline and I’ll hit it – it may not be pretty at my end (who hasn’t, at one time or another, stayed up into the wee small hours to complete a project?), but I’ll deliver a piece of work to a high standard on time, every time.

But that accountability to my clients – a clear request for deliverables and a deadline to go with it – hasn’t been extended to the business of running my business.

Lists may make plans, and they may look wonderful, but do I always execute the plan? Erm, no. Too often I've replaced my planned action for my business, my website, my blog, with activity focused on the immediate - I get caught up in my 'actual' work, forgetting about the importance of the long-term view and taking the steps needed to get me there.

And that’s where I think I went wrong after last year’s TCMA conference.

My first contact with content marketing

In September 2015 I had been lucky enough to go to another TCMA conference, for two days of inspiring workshops and talks, including a four-hour workshop facilitated by Marcus Sheridan, one of the most influential content marketers in the world, and one of the best speakers I've ever seen. It forced me (in a good way!) to think about how I ‘talk’ to my prospective clients through my online presence, and whether I’m really serving their best interests.

In practical exercises we confronted some very tough questions about how well we currently address the questions our clients want us to answer. The answer for almost all of us was ‘not very’!

Marcus inspired us with his enthusiasm and the very compelling story of his own business success using the principles of content marketing. He introduced us to the fundamentals and we worked through exercises to focus our minds on how we build trust and best serve our clients by answering their questions.

Despite being inspired, fired-up and excited by everything that I’d just learned, I didn’t execute on my ideas. Why not?

Inspiration followed by inaction - Why?

I didn't follow through because I had no deadline: I wasn’t accountable. I hadn’t actually put out there what I was going to do and when – there was no statement of intention, no commitment to action, and so it was too easy to fail to execute. This was the missing part of the jigsaw.

I don't intend to make the same mistake again after this year's conference, and so I'm going to put out there exactly what my plans are for the coming year. I know the title says five years, but – hey – baby steps, baby!

As a freelancer, I can sometimes forget that I am running a business, because it’s ‘just me' providing a service, and I am so focused on dealing with the here and now – the projects I'm working on, the next project that I'm bidding for – that I don't look at the bigger picture and think about direction and planning and why I'm doing what I do. But providing my services is a business, and I owe it to myself and my clients to behave, and therefore be treated, like one.

In the words of Richard Tubb at this year's conference, am I running my business, or is my business running me?

In order to develop professionally and as a business owner, I have to articulate to myself and to others what to expect from me. So here's the final piece of my jigsaw: my statement of intent.

Three clear commitments

I've decided on three aims, which I'm committing to here and now:

1 Create regular content for my website. Initially a weekly blog, but who knows – I may eventually make a foray into screencasting or other video content.

2 Continue to build a community around me which inspires and motivates me, and holds me accountable.

3 Redefine my business: who my ideal clients are, the type of work I enjoy doing and, just as important, what I don't enjoy.

There. I've done it. I've said what I'm going to do. And you have my permission to call me out on it if I fail to deliver.

What can I help you with?

When it comes to content, I want to write about what you are interested in. What would you like to know about proofreading and copy-editing? Do you know the difference between the two? Heck, do you even know what they actually are? Or what they do? Or how an editor can help your business?

You ask, and I'll answer.

If you have a question, or a topic for a blog post, let me know in the comments, and I'll happily answer.

Can't wait to hear from you - thanks for taking the time to read this post!

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Marketing tips for freelance editors - The Content Marketing Academy conference, June 2016

15/6/2016

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Last week I was in Edinburgh for The Content Marketing Academy conference.
It was the second time I had attended one of Chris Marr’s conferences, and it didn’t disappoint.

This was a truly inspiring event with 14 speakers, including three who flew in from the USA. Every single one gave tremendous value, and I'm still reviewing my notes. It wasn’t easy to choose, but here are my five main takeaways from the two days:

1 Don’t wait to get started

As I sometimes live my life at the intersection where perfectionism and procrastination meet, this is a message that really hit home. Amy Schmittauer of Savvy, Sexy Social made us all bite the bullet by recording a short video* there and then, mid-keynote talk.

Although I don’t know if I’m quite ready for video, she definitely made the point that you should get on with creating content. She acknowledged that your first attempts won’t be great, but don’t delete them – they allow your audience to ‘grow up’ with you on your journey.

Amy’s suggestion to use a strategy statement will help me to focus on the ‘why’ of creating content:

I make video** for _______________ about ______________

so that I can achieve _______________.

* if you want to see it in all its glory, you can find it here. Basically, it's just me saying hello and laughing a lot!
**insert content medium here, e.g. blog/podcast/webinars/online courses.

2 Produce content consistently

The need to commit and show up regularly was another key point made by several of the speakers. Kate McQuillan of Pet Sitters Ireland has grown her business to six figures by committing to the principles of content marketing. She has published more than 600 blog posts, and Kate identifies eight key action points for creating successful content:

Commit to regular posts
Create good titles based on how people would search online
Use subtitles to answer the big five questions within the post
Have a strong call to action: sign up for a newsletter, download an ebook
Use good images: invest in stock photos
Good SEO: use the meta information to boost
Share it: don’t expect people to find it by themselves
Analyse it: use analytics to assess the performance of your posts

3 Be bigger, braver, bolder

If you ever get the chance to see Ann Handley talk, do it. An author, content expert, and fantastically funny and engaging keynote speaker, she told us that the biggest missed opportunities in marketing come from playing it too safe. She asked us to:

think about what story we can tell that doesn’t otherwise exist, and
remember that our tone of voice is our gutsiest, bravest asset.

And she asked the key question – if you covered up your logo would you recognise you? Sound like yourself so that people know you.

Me + book stand = very dangerous. This was the first, and probably won't be the last ... @annhandley #TCMA2016 pic.twitter.com/MVkUQt2umA
— Denise Cowle (@dinnydaethat) June 2, 2016

Plus, Ann wrote Everybody Writes and she is all about the words, so I consider her to be one of my tribe. Although, to be fair, I think Ann preferred the term 'squad'! I think we all fell in love with her!

4 Create a season

This was the point when I think quite a few people in the room had a lightbulb moment. Colin Gray, The Podcast Host, gave a talk packed full of actionable points, of which this one, about creating a season, was key.

By creating a season you can:

save time by breaking down one big idea into several episodes or posts
go into more detail in each post
provide a hook with the progression of the idea through the season.

Batching the posts increases your efficiency and, if the content is evergreen, having a structure will help with repurposing it.

5 Find your alpha audience

The conference finished with a keynote talk and Q&A by Mark Schaefer, a globally recognised specialist in marketing strategy and social media, and all-round really nice guy.

Mark urged us to find an unsaturated niche – how noisy is yours? What will it take to compete in it? Find it and nurture your audience, who will share your content because they love you.

People share content for three reasons:

self-identity (it’s an expression of themselves)
an act of generosity and kindness
as a symbol of love and support (of the creator)

Find your alpha audience – the people who really connect with you on a deeper level – and build on their trust. Find the 2% who ignite your content, i.e. those who share it the most, and aim to turn it into 3%.

I don't need to add any words to this ... #amazing #inspired by @markwschaefer #tcma2016. pic.twitter.com/iI1mZGjaGf
— MilliesBeachHuts (@Millies_Huts) June 3, 2016

Mark left us with a message:

BE. MORE. HUMAN.

A reminder that marketing should be about making a connection, nurturing a relationship and building trust.

A simple message that cuts through the noise about reach and analytics and ROI, and reminds us that when we are selling our business, we are selling us.

Investing in attending a marketing conference may not be the most obvious thing for an editor to do. There are many others, including the SfEP annual conference (see you in Birmingham, in September!), which may seem to be more relevant.

But if we want to take our businesses seriously – and for our clients, in turn, to take us seriously – we need to look beyond our editorial horizons and learn from experts in other fields, including marketing.

I’ve already bought my ticket for next year’s TCMA conference – I wonder if I’ll see any other editors there!

This isn’t meant to be a full review of the conference – for that you could check out Col Gray’s incredibly comprehensive blog, or Claire Brotherton’s summaries of Day 1 and Day 2.

What conferences have you attended to broaden your knowledge of running your business? I’d love you to share your experiences and recommendations in the comments.

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Working as a freelance editor - the first five years

12/6/2016

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This week I celebrated five years as
a freelance proofreader and editor.

Happy anniversary to me!

A lot has happened in five years, and it’s turned out pretty well, to be honest!

I do think I could have prepared better, so if you’re thinking about making a career change, here are five things to consider:

1 Do your research

Find out about training, job prospects, the demand for your prospective new career and the opportunities to earn whatever your required income level may be. I was fortunate that my husband had worked in publishing for 20-odd years and could give me advice and point me in the general direction of useful resources.
This didn't extend to finding me work – whatever contacts he may have given me, I had to get the work on my own merits. If you’re thinking of working for publishers, most will ask you to take an editorial test before adding you to their freelancer database. I’ve taken lots of tests over the past five years!

2 Get the appropriate training

You need to be able to demonstrate your competence and ability. In my field, there are many providers of training, of varying levels of quality. The Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), the Publishing Training Centre and Publishing Scotland all run well-respected courses for editorial training. Without this evidence, how can you expect your clients to trust that you know what you’re doing? There may be financial support from your local business development agency to help you get started.

3 Seek out and use support

Find your community, your tribe, your squad (as my teenagers would say!).

One of the first things I did was go along to the Glasgow local group meeting of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. No question – this was the best decision I could have possibly made. The SfEP is an amazing organisation, dedicated to upholding and promoting the highest editorial standards, and joining it was a no-brainer for me. Over the years it has been an invaluable source of information and support, via their training courses, online members’ forum and local group meetings. And many of these colleagues (both virtual and in real life) are now my friends.

I’m also a member of several Facebook groups for editors, some of which are international, which gives an enormous breadth and depth to the knowledge pool there. A simple question about restructuring a sentence, how to word a reply to a tricky email, or rates of pay (yes, we DO share that information) can generate over 100 comments – I keep a folder of 'clippings' on my laptop so I can refer to them when required.

Spending time with like-minded people gives me a real boost – working as a freelance editor can lead to feelings of isolation and a lack of confidence, so connecting with my peers, whether face-to-face or online, can provide much-needed reassurance and restore enthusiasm.

4 Identify and use your transferable skills

We all have them. Even if you’ve been in the same field all your working life, as I had, you have skills you can apply to a completely different sector. Believe me. I even wrote a blog about it.

5 Market yourself

By their very nature, and I include myself in this, many editorial professionals feel uncomfortable about promoting themselves, not wanting to appear as pushy, or blowing their own trumpet.

Get over it.

The truth is, if you’re not online, if you’re not producing content, you don’t exist.

Get a website. Put testimonials on it from satisfied clients. Put a professional entry on LinkedIn. Here’s mine, for example. Network. This doesn’t need to be scary. If you don't know where to start, try Stefan Thomas's book, Business Networking for Dummies. I met Stef at the TCMA conference last year, and sat beside him for two days at this year's conference. He knows what he's talking about. Go to free networking meetings for local businesses and talk to people.

Don’t tell people what you do, tell them how you can help them.

A recent blog post on the Glasgow Editors’ Network website has some very useful information on marketing yourself and getting started in business.

Register with online directories in your field of work. For editorial freelancers, some, such as FindaProofreader, only require that you pay a fee. Others, such as the SfEP Directory of Editorial Services, only allow people to register when they can demonstrate a certain level of skills and experience – for SfEP this is holding Professional or Advanced Professional membership of the society.

So, what do the next five years hold?

This anniversary has really made me think about what I should be focusing on for the next five years and how I should go about doing it. With perfect timing, last week I attended The Content Marketing Academy conference in Edinburgh, which gave me so much to think about in terms of how I take my business forward.

Yes, my business. Because now I recognise that I’m not a ‘freelancer working from home’;
I run a business. And that requires a fundamental shift in thinking.

You can read about my five takeaways from The Content Marketing Academy conference in my next post.

If you’ve recently had a work anniversary, has it made you review what you’ve been doing? Let me know in the comments if you would change anything, or if things have gone exactly as you planned. (Lucky you, what’s your secret?!)

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Worry-free Writing: how to use an ellipsis

7/6/2016

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What is an ellipsis?

We've all seen them – and used them – those little dots that create suspense, or trail off dialogue.

But have you ever stopped to think about whether there's a correct number of dots you should use, or when you should use them?

Some people are just dot-mad and take a 'more the merrier' approach. Admit it, we've all seen a PowerPoint slide where the speaker tries to introduce some suspense about what's coming on the next slide like this ....................

But ...

An ellipsis isn’t just a random number of full stops you can bash out on your keyboard.

It’s a separate character, just like any other punctuation mark.

And it consists of three full stops. No more. No less.

Three.

How do I make an ellipsis?

To make an ellipsis in Word on a PC, hit:

Ctrl + Alt + full stop

To make an ellipsis on a Mac, it’s:

Option + ;

Bingo, you have an ellipsis just like this one …

Doing this uses only one character space, instead of three when you use full stops, which is useful when character numbers are limited, for example on Twitter.

How do I use an ellipsis?

An ellipsis has two uses in a sentence:

1 An ellipsis shows that a sentence is unfinished. It is used when the writer has left something unsaid or when a sentence tails off.

For example, in your story, a character may arrive home after a hard day at work and say this to her partner:

I forgot to buy a bottle of wine. I suppose we could manage without it …

Here, the unsaid words are 'but I really want you to go out and get one. Right now!'

2 An ellipsis is also used to show you have left out text from a direct quote.

Here is a quote from this website:

'I work for a variety of publishers ... in both print and digital format.'

Here, the omitted text is 'on course books, supplementary materials, website content and promotional materials'.

The ellipsis is used here to remove some extra information that may not be necessary in the context in which the quote is being used, or to make a long extract fit the page better.

Should I put a space before an ellipsis?

The ellipsis can be closed up, that is, without a space before and after it...like this.

And it can be open, with a space either side ... like this.

These are style decisions, not hard and fast rules, but, as ever, be consistent in how you decide to use your ellipses.

Sometimes the ellipsis can be put inside square brackets [...] when it is used to indicate omitted text from a quote, as in the second example. This is more common in academic texts or formal writing.

So there you are – an ellipsis is an individual character, and there are two reasons for using it. I hope that will help you the next time you want to use one!

(Oh, and the plural of ellipsis is ellipses, not ellipsises or ellipsi!)

Over to you!

What do you think? Does it bother you if someone uses four, or six, or eight dots?

If this is new information to you, do you think you'll make an effort to make and use an ellipsis correctly, or is it really not that important to you?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and any suggestions for future topics to include in my Worry-free Writing series.

If there's a grammar point you're not clear on, or punctuation mark you're not sure about, drop in a comment below, or tweet me using the hashtag #WorryFreeWriting.

For my take on language and writing, and general musings on working for yourself, why not sign up to hear about updates to my blog?

As a thank you, you'll get a copy of my free ebook, Creating Your Style Sheet, to help you be more consistent in your writing.

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Worry-free Writing: how to use a semicolon

How do I use a semicolon?

What is a semicolon for?

1 A semicolon separates two sections of a sentence which are closely linked. ​

2 A semicolon can be used to separate the items in a list.

Over to you!

Working as a freelance editor - the next five years

The problem with not having accountability

My first contact with content marketing

Inspiration followed by inaction - Why?

Three clear commitments

What can I help you with?

Marketing tips for freelance editors - The Content Marketing Academy conference, June 2016

​1 Don’t wait to get started

2 Produce content consistently

3 Be bigger, braver, bolder

​4 Create a season

​5 Find your alpha audience

Working as a freelance editor - the first five years

1 Do your research

2 Get the appropriate training

3 Seek out and use support

4 Identify and use your transferable skills

5 Market yourself

So, what do the next five years hold?

Worry-free Writing: how to use an ellipsis

​What is an ellipsis?

​How do I make an ellipsis?

​How do I use an ellipsis?

1 An ellipsis shows that a sentence is unfinished. It is used when the writer has left something unsaid or when a sentence tails off.

​2 An ellipsis is also used to show you have left out text from a direct quote.

Should I put a space before an ellipsis?

Over to you!

Archives

1 A semicolon separates two sections of a sentence which are closely linked.

1 Don’t wait to get started

4 Create a season

5 Find your alpha audience

What is an ellipsis?

How do I make an ellipsis?

How do I use an ellipsis?

2 An ellipsis is also used to show you have left out text from a direct quote.