Contents -- About This Course -- How to Take This Course -- Pre-Test -- 1 Why Worry About Grammar and Proofreading? -- A Manager's Writing Process -- How to Improve Your Writing -- Two Common Writing Problems that Waste Time and Money -- Procrastination -- Impulsive Writing -- Ways to Avoid These Problems -- The Three C's and PAT: Keys to Get You Started -- 2 A Concise Style -- Concise: Why Less Is More -- The Professional Writing Process -- Editing for Conciseness -- How to Begin -- Why Wordiness Harms Your Message -- 3 Grammar Basics: Words and Sentences -- Our Approach to Grammar -- Our Objective -- The Building Blocks of the Sentence: Words -- Basic Parts of the Sentence -- The Subject -- The Predicate -- Compound Subjects and Predicates -- Incomplete Sentences: Sentence Fragments -- No-Subject Fragments -- No-Verb and Incomplete-Verb Fragments -- Extra-Information Fragments -- Dependent-Word Fragments -- Correcting Sentence Fragments -- No-Subject Fragments -- No-Verb and Incomplete-Verb Fragments -- Extra-Information Fragments -- Dependent-Word Fragments -- Exceptions to the Rules Governing Sentence Fragments -- 4 Correct Sentences and Paragraphs -- Why the Correct Sentence Is Essential -- The Complete Sentence -- Run-On Sentences -- Correcting Run-On Sentences -- Avoiding Run-On Sentences -- Paragraphs: Groups of Sentences -- Appearance Is Critical -- What Makes a Paragraph? -- Transitional Words in Action -- Repetition as a Transition and Link -- 5 Correct Grammar: Agreement and Word Placement -- A Background of Verb Use -- Verb and Pronoun Agreement -- Agreement: Person and Number -- Common Errors in Verb and Pronoun Agreement -- Collective and Plural Nouns and Verbs -- Collective and Plural Nouns and Pronouns -- Review -- Unity of Words -- Opening Words -- Distance from Words Modified -- Modifiers that Go Two Ways -- Dangling Modifiers.

Split Infinitives and Verb Phrases -- 6 Punctuation Essentials: What You Need to Know -- Punctuation: The Professional Touch -- The Comma -- Comma Rule One: Join Independent Clauses -- Comma Rule Two: After Introductory Material -- Comma Rule Three: Items in a Series -- Comma Rule Four: Two with Interrupters -- Comma Rule Five: Standard Practice -- Commas and Time -- The Semicolon and the Colon -- The Semicolon -- The Colon -- The Dash -- Parentheses -- The Apostrophe -- End Punctuation -- 7 Mechanics and Miscellaneous Punctuation -- Mechanics -- Capitalization -- Capitalize All Proper Nouns and Proper Adjectives -- Overcapitalization -- Numbers -- Numbers that Begin a Sentence -- Multiple Numbers in a Sentence -- Number Usage According to Standard Practice -- Abbreviations -- Standard Abbreviations -- Latin Words and Phrases -- Abbreviations to Avoid -- Abbreviations and Standard Practice -- The Slash Mark -- The Ellipsis Mark -- Quotation Marks -- Quotations and Periods and Commas -- Quotations and Semicolons and Colons -- Quotations and Question Marks, Exclamation Points, and Dashes -- Overuse of Quotation Marks -- Italics -- When Not to Use Italics -- When to Use Italics -- Brackets -- The Hyphen -- The Hyphen as a Divider -- The Hyphen as a Joiner -- Multiple Punctuation Marks -- Punctuation and Writing Dilemmas -- The Grammar Hotline -- Writers Deserve Help -- 8 Proofreading for Clarity -- Clarity of Meaning: Is It Down PAT? -- Parallelism -- Shifts in Tense, Mood, and Voice -- Shifts in Tense -- Shifts in Mood -- Shifts in Voice -- Word Order and Sentence Variety -- Sentence Variety -- Word Order -- Common Word Pitfalls -- Good and Well -- Who and Whom -- I and Me -- Words that Can Lead to Trouble -- Negative Words and Repetitive Words -- 9 Proofreading for Words and Precision -- Proofreading and the Writing Process -- Word Choice.

Stuffy Language, Cliches, and Jargon -- Know Your Audience -- Eliminate Excess -- Writing Tone and Style -- Word Choice Review -- Spelling Words Correctly -- Proofreading Is Essential -- Proofreading Errors and Their Impact -- How Errors Happen -- Gaining Some Distance to Enhance Proofreading -- Typographical Errors -- Wrap-Up -- Bibliography -- Post-Test -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W.