grammar

A step-by-step process for organizing your thoughts and powering up your prose (originally presented at the 2007 OSU Extension Spring Training program).

Here's an easy method to help you organize your writing without doing an outline.

Knowing how to avoid writing mistakes likely to send an editor scrambling for the “delete” key is a good way to smooth having your submission accepted for publication.

You'll stand tall in your readers' eyes if you replace long words with shorter ones whenever you can.

Many sins of poor writing are lumped under the heading of “wordiness.” Among them are redundancy; overuse of adverbs, adjectives, and prepositional phrases; and use of big words when a small one will do.

Even on the slimmest budget, your newsletter can be a useful, reliable document of record that tracks the events, accomplishments, membership, and goals of your group.

Skillfully blending the passive voice into your prose lends it variety and spice.

Your lead paragraph can be a grabber, your quotes pithy and your prose perfect. But if you allow errors--even little ones--to creep into your copy, they'll damage your credibility.

The best-written text in the world will fail to serve its purpose if the reading level is too high for the intended readers.

A suggested checklist of tasks that not only will identify and solve common writing problems, but could reduce the amount of time you spend rereading, tinkering, rewriting, and re-editing.