There are some recurring errors I see in documents which are easy to fix but take my time as website Editor.
Avoiding them will make my job a lot easier and make your content more readable. These are rules I follow as a professional copywriter and are consistent for the companies paying me for my work.
– There is no such date as November 22nd or October 13th. The “nd” and “th” are possessives, and only used if you say “the 22nd of November” or the “13th of October”. Please just use the month and day, and avoid the possessive form. If I see it I remove it.
– The same thing goes for using a possessive form such as “RV’s” versus “RVs.” The form “RV’s” means something belonging to the RV, rather than simply saying there is more than one.
– The old days of adding two spaces after a period, or full stop if you prefer, are over. That was a carryover from typewriter fonts where two spaces were needed to see the end of a sentence. Web content is clear with only a single space, and the double space after a sentence is not needed. All those extra spaces add time to your day, so you don’t need to use them.
– Run-on sentences are subjective, but a general rule to use is end a sentence and start a new one if you want to place a comma there. This is particularly true if the two phrases separated by the comma can stand alone.
– Web pages are more readable with shorter sentences, and use only three to four sentences per paragraph. Readers will ignore your efforts if you publish long paragraphs.
– Capitalize names like Board and Committee to recognize words describing a group, but Fund, Statement, Meeting, and other words like that do not need nor should they be capitalized. Capital letters should be used for official terms such as Finance Report or Balance Sheet if the terms are used to describe a particular document, but “we looked at a balance sheet of the Committee” is appropriate otherwise. Another example would be “we attended the Finance Committee meeting” not “we attended the Finance Committee Meeting.” Over-capitalizing words makes your documents hard to read.
– Spell out the days of the week and the months of the year. Filling a document with Jan., Mar., Nov, Mon., or Fri. makes them harder to read.
– We live in La Casa, not LaCasa or lacasa.