Bette Frick  The Text Doctor LLC

The Text Doctor's Diagnosis February 2013

My inaugural blog for the Society for Technical Communication, published February 11, reviewed the excellent second edition of What to Charge: Pricing Strategies for Freelancers and Consultants. But why should you, especially if you are an employee, care about charging for your work? As I wrote in the blog, author Laurie Lewis suggests that we should "log every activity on every project and then mine those logs to understand more clearly how long the tasks of a prospective project might take." I would argue that employees and freelancers alike need to know how long your work activities take so that you can provide valid estimates of future work when asked. Knowing how long tasks can take could help you prove to a boss or client why it is impossible for you or anyone to write 30 pages a day or edit 150 pages a day.

 

Well, Lewis has convinced me: I now use my kitchen timer while performing most of my activities and then capture my time on scraps of paper or Excel spreadsheets. Several of my freelance friends have suggested a better way: digitally capturing time using time-tracking software.

 

 

Every decent style guide in America has a fully developed chapter on capitalization and the rules are pretty straightforward. Instead of covering hundreds of rules in depth here, I'd like to share three questions about capitalization that came up during a recent webinar on grammar. I'll answer the questions and then summarize my answers with one principle.

• Should I capitalize every word in my complimentary closing: "Sincerely Yours" or "Sincerely yours"?

I believe in the statement: "When in doubt, don't." Fortunately, The Gregg Reference Manual backs me up in section 1346: Capitalize only the first word of a closing.

 

Click here to see two more questions about capitalization and learn more about downstyle.

  

January's writing lesson focused on how to express numbers. The quiz asked you if the numbers in this sentence were formatted correctly according to The Gregg Reference Manual (GRM):

We have 6 customer service representatives and 12 field sales people.

 

Congratulations to the 80% of you who agreed that both numbers should be expressed as numerals (because the second number, 12, is formatted as a numeral). Your answer was consistent with Section 402 of GRM: "Use the same style to express related numbers above and below 10. If any of the numbers are above 10, put them all in figures."