The Clean Composition Blog
Grammar and style tips and tricks to help keep your writing clean, clear, and straightforward
Announcing My New Searchable Portfolio
I am so excited to announce that I have revamped my portfolio, moving it from a static table to a dynamic, searchable database! You can access my new portfolio at https://bit.ly/relrom_portfolio, using the password “portfolio”. I’ve selected Airtable to host my…
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What if I told you that you could save lots of time, money, and institutional memory with one simple action?
It’s true! And, I bet you’d be even more interested if I told you this step would require less than 30 seconds, right? It’s so simple. Yet every day I see colleagues doing exactly the opposite, costing precious time that we could use…
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Boomers vs. Zoomers, or How I Honed My WTF Face Upon Learning that Punctuation No Longer Matters
Q&A with a Millennial: How to punctuate so Zoomers will respect you So read the title of an article that figuratively slapped me across the face as I scrolled through my Google alerts for grammar and punctuation. (Yes, I’m that…
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You can have the Oxford comma when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Pact, my employer, uses AP Style, which favors brevity over anything else. Actually, the entire field of international development is moving toward using AP, an initiative led by USAID. Putting aside my other feelings about AP style in our field…
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How to Get More Content into Less Space
As an editor, the most frequent request I get from staff is to cut text or make text fit into a smaller space. Sometimes this is easy. Sometimes it’s more like my cat Teddy trying to force himself into this…
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Abbreviations vs. Acronyms, and Why You Should Stop Calling It an Acronyms List
As with most fields, my primary field, international development, uses many standards and jargon that do not follow traditional rules of grammar, language, and spelling (and I’m a traditionalist). Some are harmless, such as capitalizing the “g” in “Government” when referring…
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To Split or Not to Split… That is the Question about Infinitives
As an editor, this is the #1 question I get. Is it OK to use split infinitives? Lots of sources provide conflicting opinions. Many, like Oxford English Dictionary’s Language Matters, say “yes.” But, I say “no.” Sure, split infinitives have become…
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Word Crimes
I’m not sure about all of you, but I’ve been a huge “Weird Al” Yankovic fan for years. His newest singles have been released in the past few days, and they’re better than some of the parodies he’s written in…
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Who is “she”?
One of my past editing instructors loved giving us grammar lessons about pronoun usage and why placement matters, so this issue has been drilled into my brain! I saw this on Facebook today and thought it was a great example.…
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Proper Punctuation Matters
I’ve seen quite a few memes over the last year or so that highlight the importance of properly placed punctuation (say that three times fast 😉 ). Here are a couple of my favorites… (from the blog Bilinguish) (from Adult…
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10 Words and Phrases that Too Many Folks Say Incorrectly
Yes! And, I would like to add a couple more… repour → rapport alterior motive → ulterior motive Do you have any particular pet peeve words or phrases that everyone seems to use incorrectly? Add them in the comments or email me and I’ll…
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Welcome to my new website!
Hello friends, colleagues, and clients! Welcome to my new website! I look forward to sharing with you my writing and editing tips and tricks, my publications and other career successes, and some fun memes and anecdotes about communication. Feel free…
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Clean Composition by Rachel Elrom 