Dos and Don'ts in formal English writing 英文写作的避忌

I will pinpoint some of the mistakes commonly made by my Chinese friends when writing in English. I will make some suggestions as to how those mistakes could be rectified. I am not concerned about writing e-mails or SMS, but examinations and business correspondence. Here they are:

1. Do leave a space after a punctuation mark. I see a lot of my friends don't do that and scramble all the words in one page. I think mostly due to that the Chinese language does not have this requirement. As a general rule one space should be left after a comma or a fullstop.
2. Do capitalize the first letter of a proper name, such as a country, a person's name & etc..  For example United States. Brandon Zin, the West (referring to western countries). "I", in first person, must be capitalised.
3. Do check your spellings  After you finish writing, spend about 2 minutes to check the spellings. A lot of mistakes could be easily spotted. A little thing like this could mean a big difference if you are on the borderline between a pass or a fail in an examination or being hired or not in a job interview. If you are using a computer, a click of the "spell check" button will do the job..
4. Do make sure every sentence is grammatically correct. As a good rule of thumb, every sentence must have a subject, a verb and an object.
5. Don't use slangs and try to avoid abbreviations. If you write to a person you know for the first time or to your superior, try to avoid using slangs, such as "it is cool" or "it is ok", as they are not acceptable in formal writing. Nowadays we tend to use a lot of abbreviations or acronyms (initials). Don't do that unless the abbreviations are generally acceptable (like e-mail, no one writes electronic mail). As for acronyms, please make absolutely sure that your readers understand them, for example, not everyone know FYI stands for "for you information",

If you have any related questions, please feel free to ask me by using the form in the page entitled "I got a question" and I will attend to them immediately.
我想在这里谈谈我的中国朋友在英文写作常见的错误，我会提出一些建议如何纠正，我不是针对写电邮或短信上的问题，而是针对考试或公事文书。请留意:

1. 在每一个标点符号后须留一空格， 很多的朋友都没有这样做，他们将所有文字标点堆作一囤，这可能跟中文打字没有这规定有关。
2. 专有名词的第一个字母要大写，如 United States, Brandon Zin, the West ( 西方国家). I (我）一定要大写。
3. 写完一篇文章后须检查你的拼写，很多的拼音错误很容易发现，如果用电脑按一按拼写检查便可以，这一细节在考试合格与不合格，面试被雇用与否可能有很大的分别。
4. 一定要确保每一句语法正确，基本上每句须包含主词,动词和被动词 (subject, verb, object)。
5. 不要随便用俚语或缩写，如果你写信给一个你第一次认识的朋友或你上司，尽量避免用俚语如 "It is cool" 或 "It is ok" ，现在我们很喜欢用缩写或首字母缩写，除非是普遍接受的缩写如 e-mail， 至于首字母缩写除非你肯定对方看得懂不是的话也要避免，不是每个人都懂 FYI 是 "for your information".

如果你有有关学习英语的问题可以用"我要发问"一拦提问我会很快回复你。