A well-organized and designed technical document loses credibility when filled with grammatical and punctuation errors. To avoid common errors, make sure you understand the following prescriptions:
- Avoid ambiguity by eliminating ambiguous pronouns that have no clear referent and by moving or eliminating misplaced modifiers and dangling phrases.
- Use parallel structure to increase the clarity of embedded lists within sentences.
- Use parallel verb tenses and grammatical constructions to increase clarity in bulleted and numbered lists.
- Use consistent verb tenses to express correct relationships when writing about actions that occur at various times.
- Use commas to separate parts of the sentence for clarity and to set off words, phrases, or clauses that interrupt the normal word order of a sentence.
- Use semi-colons as separators between sentence units that are grammatically equal and between items in a series containing commas.
- Consult a style guide when using hyphens or punctuating lists to ensure correctness and consistency.
Technical professionals whose first language is not English can avoid common grammatical problems by studying proper placement of adverbs and adjectives; learning the correct use of abbreviations and acronyms, capitalization, definite and indefinite articles, referent pronouns, gerunds and infinitives, idioms, prepositions, two-word verbs, and the present perfect verb tense; and learning to recognize the correct spelling of commonly misspelled words.
