English Grammar Workbook For Dummies, with Online Practice, 3rd Edition

Chapter 14

Writing for Electronic Media

IN THIS CHAPTER

Adapting traditional grammar rules to texts, emails, and blog posts

Creating proper and effective presentation slides

When you and your 5,000 closest friends communicate on a social networking site, should you worry about grammar? The answer is a definite maybe. Electronic media — texts, instant messages, tweets, emails, social media posts, and the like — have bent some traditional grammar rules and broken more than a few. I’m not upset about these changes. In fact, I’m happy that the written word is making a comeback. But some rules may be broken without creating confusion, and some may not.

In this chapter I explain what you can get away with — and when — and what sends you to the grammar penitentiary. I also show you the ins and outs of presentation slides, so you can fire off bullet points with confidence.

Knowing Your Audience: The Right Writing for the Right Situation

In some situations you may want to write informally, without sacrificing meaning, of course. If you’re dealing with a friend or co-worker, you can generally drop a few words and punctuation marks, especially if you’re limited to 200 or so characters (letters and spaces) in your message. Your peers probably don’t care about capital letters either (though ...