About 90% of my work day is consumed by writing — one of my favorite things to do. Along with creating my executive clients’ personal brand communications and career marketing documents, I’m busy maintaining two blogs, contributing content to a number of blogs and websites (including here at Brand-yourself), and keeping up with my own business and career marketing materials.
In my spare time, one of my passions is working on NY Times Sunday crossword puzzles.
All of this is driven by my love of words. I’m always looking for resources that will help me find the right words and improve my writing. If these resources make word-searching and learning fun, so much the better!
I readily admit that, although grammatical errors can drive me up the wall, I’m certainly no expert. I’m sure my blog posts contain mistakes that have my readers tsking. That being said, I always try to make my writing as professional as possible. The bottom line is, the way you write says a lot about you and your personal brand.
Here are two websites I’ve turned to recently to sharpen my writing:
Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips
Mignon Fogarty (@GrammarGirl on Twitter) offers daily grammar tips, to which you can subscribe. Some topics she’s covered that plague me:
Ending a Sentence With a Preposition
#8 in her Top Ten Grammar Myths, honoring National Grammar Day (March 4), is:
“Irregardless” is not a word. Wrong! “Irregardless” is a bad word and a word you shouldn’t use, but it is a word. “Floogetyflop” isn’t a word—I just made it up and you have no idea what it means. “Irregardless,” on the other hand, is in almost every dictionary labeled as nonstandard. You shouldn’t use it if you want to be taken seriously, but it has gained wide enough use to qualify as a word.
Wordnik
According to their site, Wordnik (@wordnik on Twitter) is billions of words, 423 million example sentences, 4.7 million unique words, and over 185,000 comments, 95,000 tags, 74,000 pronunciations, 24,518 favorites and 728,464 words in 23,583 lists created by 39,849 Wordniks.
In a NY Times Sunday Magazine “On Language” article in December, Erin McKean, chief executive and founder of Wordnik, explained what the online dictionary is trying to accomplish:
“We’re using text-mining techniques and the unlimited space of the Internet to show as many real examples of word use as we can, as fast as we can.
A word is so much more than its meaning: it’s also who uses it, when it was used, what words appear alongside it and what kinds of texts it appears in.”
Wordnik includes definitions, examples, pronounciations, etymologies, and statistics.
The Word of the Day on March 10 was “shuckish”. Think you know what it means? Here’s the definition.
Related post:
65 Power Personal Branding Verbs to Nail Your Executive Value Proposition
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An Executive Personal Branding, Online Identity and Job Search Strategist, Meg is a 20-year careers industry professional and one of only a handful of people worldwide to hold the Reach Certified Personal Branding Strategist and Master Resume Writer credentials, both gold standards.
“I love my work collaborating with savvy senior executives and entrepreneurs who know where they’re going, but need help differentiating their unique promise of value in the new world of work and executive job search, and positioning themselves to work their passion. My clients are typically c-suite, senior-level executives and rising stars.”
Find out more about Meg at Executive Career Brand, and by viewing her LinkedIn profile and following her on Twitter.
