Niles: But Miss Fine's age is only ... Fran: Young! Miss Fine's age is only young!

4. Excessive punctuation: Only one exclamation mark or question mark should be used at a time. Consider following over-punctuated examples:

Buy now!!! Great bargains!!!!!!!!!!

Excessive punctuation looks too much like hysteria and detracts from your credibility. Avoid it.

5. Headings: For long works, establish a clear hierarchy of headings. Microsoft Word's heading styles are great for this. (They also allow you to automatically create a table of contents.)

6. Hyphenating prefixes: Most prefixes don't need a hyphen; i.e. we write "coexist", not "co-exist". There are exceptions, though. The prefixes "self-" and "ex-" are almost always hyphenated.

7. Numbers: Numbers of ten or less are normally written as words.

8. Quotation marks: Users of American English should use double quotes (" "). Users of British English should choose either single quotes (' ') or double quotes and stick with them for whole document. Incidentally, British English usage is increasingly moving towards single quotes.

9. Spaces: Modern style is to use a single space at end of a sentence, not two. Also, most punctuation marks (e.g. commas, full stops, question marks) are not preceded by a space.

10.Tables: Set table text one or two points smaller than main body text and in a sans-serif font such as Arial or Verdana. Avoid vertical lines as they tend to add unnecessary clutter.

Armed with these simple guidelines, your writing should be well received every time. Good luck!

Here language is deliberately worrying. Words like "leaking", "dangerous", "contaminants", "unfounded", "urgently" and "damaging" all combine to persuade reader that current situation must be investigated.

CHANGING

If you're trying to change a belief (the hardest of three tasks), you'll have to be especially persuasive as it's human nature for people to resist such changes.

If reader is to accept your argument for change then it may require him to admit (even if just to himself) that his current beliefs or practices are in error, and many people are deeply reluctant to do this. There are issues of loss of face, humiliation and status involved.

One approach to this problem is to be diplomatic and emphasise how existing practices were sound in past but now need to change to meet new circumstances. For example:

Our existing security practices were well suited to conditions in early to mid-nineties. The changes brought about by networking and rise of Internet, however, mean that it is now time to change our attitudes. We need to recognise mission-critical importance of heightened I.T. security.

Note that this appeal is polite and non-threatening. Also it uses inclusive words like "we", not "you". Hopefully, accepting it won't be perceived as losing face.