How to Write Acknowledgements

Look at your word count. One of the main challenges in writing acknowledgements or similar items is knowing about the available space and matching your remarks to the allotted word count. Ask editors or others about how much room you have to correctly recognize everyone's effort.

Think about an appropriate tone. Anything that is written will generally be more formal than remarks that are shouted out off the cuff in front of a microphone. That doesn't mean your acknowledgements need to sound stuffy or stilted, just that it might make sense to exclude some of the idiosyncrasies of the spoken word.

• Evaluate items like slang and contractions. Chances are your written acknowledgement will suffer from the use of "ain't," "gonna" and other such words translated directly to the written page. Consider your word choices carefully, since written acknowledgements usually become a permanent record in some projects.

See if anyone is left out of your acknowledgements. One important idea in the task of writing acknowledgements involves making sure that everyone is thanked or recognized. This part of your writing process could keep you up at night, but with a little careful research, you should be able to cover most of your bases.

• Always think about including groups, rather than individuals, in acknowledgements, especially if there were a great many people involved in a project. Making a group acknowledgement helps to lower your chances of leaving out any particular individual, and also helps you to meet your word count as mentioned above.

Draft short sentences. Look at all of your notes for acknowledgements and start to put them into proper sentence form. This is your chance to put in or leave out specific facts, names and ideas. Get your acknowledgements into a rough form that flows logically and conveys everything that you wanted to communicate.

Proofread your remarks. A final edit can make the difference between a well-crafted set of acknowledgements and a clunky, erroneous or typo-ridden essay. Go through the text as much as you need to in order to catch any mistakes.