Like it or not, people judge you by how you write. Strong writing skills will help you get noticed, earn your colleagues’ trust and move you up in your career, says author and writing coach Roger C. Parker. Five suggestions to help you improve your writing:

Many among us battle vision impairment, dyslexia and other obstacles that affect reading comprehension. Writers can take simple steps to make their work more accessible to such readers, writes Erika Enigk.

Acronyms and abbreviations are a great way to tighten up your writing and save yourself some keystrokes, but they’re only clear to insiders who use them on a regular basis. Good writers are careful to follow these rules for using acronyms and abbreviations.

Microsoft Word’s grammar check alerts you when you repeat a word, but is repeating a word always wrong? Bonnie Trenga, author of The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier, says no. Here are several examples to illustrate when it’s perfectly fine to repeat a word.

Employers say the grammar skills of people they hire are getting worse, The Wall Street Journal reports. The culprit: the informality of email, texting and Twitter.

What’s the rule on these four sentence-starting and -stopping strategies? 1. Starting a sentence with “and” or “but.” 2. Launching a sentence with “There is” or “There are.” 3. Ending a sentence with a preposition. 4. Starting a sentence with “how­­ever.”