Your job as a writer is to get your message across clearly and quickly.

One way you can sabotage communication is by laying traps for readers. Traps that halt a reader’s natural flow as their eye scans over text.

Punctuation – as the name suggests – stops flow. This is why I leave out optional commas.

You can also slow down a reader’s flow when you use capital letters incorrectly. For the same reason you should never write a word entirely in capitals.

Companies that insist their names are spelled out in capitals only do this because they want to halt the reader’s flow and make them take notice. You do not have to indulge them. It’s another story if they are paying you to write marketing copy.

Likewise I don’t use the ‘&’ symbol – instead I always write ‘and’. The exception to this rule is when the ‘&’ forms part of a company’s name.

The same applies to ‘+’.

It is also better to write out percent in full than use %. Although some newspapers, including one where I work, insists on using the symbol.

Never resort to phone text-style language in anything written for a wider audience. It isn’t funny, clever or useful.