Friday, March 13, 2009

Business Writing Quizzes: Test Your Writing Skills

From BusinessWriting.com, a series of quizzes on business writing:

Commonly Misspelled Word Quiz on the most often misspelled words in business writing.

Thanks to Newmark's Door.

Here are some more business writing quizzes:

Subject and Verb Agreement Quiz: This quiz will help you learn whether you have a problem with subject and verb agreement.

Active and Passive Voice Quiz: This interactive quiz allows you to rewrite sentences to make them active.

The 26 Most Common Business Writing Errors Quiz: The quiz covers common errors in commas, "that" and "which," quotation marks, colons, semicolons, dashes, capitalization, and other areas in business writing.

Commonly Confused Word Pairs Quiz of the 25 word pairs often confused in business writing.

MP: Somebody said "Sloppy writing reflects (and advertises) sloppy thinking." I guess the corollary would be that "Careful, clear writing reflects (and advertises) clear thinking."

Becoming a more effective and careful writer, like becoming better at golf, is a never-ending, life-long project; there's always room for improvement. I plan to take all of these quizzes and improve my writing.

Related: NY Times article "What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence."

3 Comments:

At 3/13/2009 10:03 AM, Blogger ExtremeHobo said...

I sent this to my Pakistani co-worker. Sadly, he is actually a better writer than half my peers in college were.

 
At 3/13/2009 10:25 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

For those of you who have seen my comments posted all I can say is thank you to the professor. A lot of us have gotten sloppy and lazy in our writings under the delusion that everything would come so easy for us. We now need to recognize the our fortunes are slipping away. To rebuild we have to be business-like and play for keeps with accurate, legible and coherent writing that is unambiguous and effective.

I will go to the links and work hard to improve my written communications.

 
At 3/13/2009 4:32 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

What's the economic incentive in being a good writer? A few years ago, I scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT's verbal section and got a perfect 6.0 on its analytical writing assessment, and then went 0-for-6 on b-school applications. Had I done that well on the math section, I bet I would have been a shoe-in. On the other hand, if I were that good in math, I might have become a financial engineer and helped wreck the financial system.

 

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