How to Look Good in Print

by Leva Duell

Published on this site: August 4th, 2005 - See more articles from this month

Follow these guidelines to use special characters correctly. It will make your documents easier to read and give you more credibltiy.

• The hyphen, often mislabeled a dash, is often misused. A hyphen (-) connects words together, an en (-) dash replaces the words "to" or "through," and an em (-) dash represents a pause. An en dash is roughly the length of an upper case N, and an em dash is the length of an upper case M.
  
  
• The inch mark ("), quotation mark ("), foot mark ('), and apostrophe (') have different meanings. Inch marks and footmarks are straight, quotation marks and apostrophes are curved.
  
  
• Ellipses ( . . . ) are the three dots indicating excerpts of text or omission of words. The ellipses the computer makes (...) are too compressed. They look better if you use a space before and after each dot.

Make a good impression with error-free documents. Correct use of special characters will increase the readability of your documents and build more trust for your products and services.



Leva Duell, Looking for typing work at home? Start a secretarial business. The Secretarial-Business-in-a-Box provides instant tools you need to start and run a successful secretarial service. Free articles and business start-up newsletter at http://www.startasecretarialbusiness.com