mystery shopping wording perfection

I just started making out applications to these mystery shops, and every one of them want perfect punctuation, now I know you can do spell check but is there anywhere you can do some kind of a punctuation check? I would appreciate any help on this subject.

Create an Account or Log In

Membership is free. Simply choose your username, type in your email address, and choose a password. You immediately get full access to the forum.

Already a member? Log In.

I always encourage the preparation of any narrative--whether for a report or for an application--to be done in Word or a Word equivalent. These offer you the spell check and most have a grammar check as well. The grammar check will sometimes pick up punctuation mistakes. But frankly they are not very good.

I copied and pasted your post into Word and it found no issues. If I were editing it just for punctuation, I would have changed it to:

I just started making out applications to these mystery shops, and every one of them want perfect punctuation. Now I know you can do spell check, but is there anywhere you can do some kind of a punctuation check? I would appreciate any help on this subject.

I find that I think in phrases. Here are the phrases I found in your work:

I just started making out applications to these mystery shops
every one of them want perfect punctuation
I know you can do spell check
is there anywhere you can do some kind of a punctuation check
I would appreciate any help on this subject

Try to put no more than two related phrases in a sentence. When you put more you risk losing control over tense and number. This happens in the second phrase above, where 'every one' needs 'wants' because 'one' makes it singular (as in, 'She wants', 'They want').

Dee Shops posted some grammar sites at
[www.mysteryshopforum.com] that you may want to take a look at.

Super quick and dirty . . .

She told me, "This brand is new." [comma before opening quotation, capitalization of T, period before ending quote]

First, second and third. OR First, second, and third. Either is acceptable as long as you remain consistent.

For shopping: Stay away from parentheticals (those comments inside parentheses).

Avoid the temptation--any temptation--to add a phrase set off by hyphens. They can be fun for emphasis in casual writing but will give you a problem in a report.

I will use exclamation points only in a quote of an enthusiastic employee. She greeted us with a friendly, "Hi! Welcome to Joe's Grill!"

Similarly, I avoid question marks except in quoting what the employee said to me. She asked me, "Did you find everything you need?" (In narrative, where I need to convey the question I asked the employee, I will state that I asked her whether the product came in larger sizes, rather than making my comment a direct quote.)

There are grammatically correct constructions that allow you to split a quote or put it somewhere other than at the end of the sentence. What I have found in mystery shopping is that when I do any of that, no matter how grammatically correct it is, I seem to get grief that editors had to do, "Minor edits." I just avoid the issue by putting the quote at the end of a sentence after an introduction to the quote, followed by a comma.

Hope this helps.
Flash, what an impressively thorough and thoughtful post!

Even the best of us can trip up now again. Not to mention, I find that the older I get, the more I forget! (Yikes!) A site that I love is [grammar.quickanddirtytips.com]. The site has been helpful to me at times, and in general, it's interesting and amusing! (She's got a following on Facebook and twitter, too.)
Flash - You are the bomb! On every newbie topic I'm going to you have given such great information! Thanks!
Sorry, only registered users may post in this forum.

Click here to login