Grammar nazis are alive and well
This Embarrasses You and I*
One of my Bama colleagues sent me this link to a recent Wall Street Journal piece on grammar in the workplace. It’s generated 671 comments as I write this. Whew!

One of my Bama colleagues sent me this link to a recent Wall Street Journal piece on grammar in the workplace. It’s generated 671 comments as I write this. Whew!
Although I don’t have much time today, I promised the doctoral students I met with at LSU last Friday that I would share an interesting phrasebank from the folks at the University of Manchester for those learning to write like a researcher in English. Here are some examples for use in the Introduction section of…
As Forbes.com contributor Naomi Robbins says, Despite the fact that graphs are now ubiquitous in virtually every field of business, very few people have received any training on how to read or design a graph. Naomi ran a graph makeover contest in which she explains why the bar graph shown here is a much better choice than the original…
The first three parts of my series on defining plain language focused on the three aspects of the rhetorical triangle: (1) textual elements like style and organization, (2) reader outcomes like comprehension and usability, and (3) writer outcomes like organizational costs and benefits. To overcome the limitations of any one of those aspects when considered alone,…
We use language to communicate content. But we also use it to manage social relations. And we have to do both within the same message. Watch this 10-minute RSA Animate video of Steven Pinker‘s Language as a Window into Human Nature to explore this topic. The need to manage social relations explains why plain language, although…
A few days ago, Lee Salz published Help! My salespeople can’t write! He notes that writing skill has become critical because business-to-business selling involves lots of emails and electronic documents, where face-to-face and phone conversations used to prevail. Salz summarizes a test for assessing a job candidate’s writing skills that is worth sharing. As a final…
Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz summarize the implications of some recent psychological research on format this way: Any variable that facilitates or impairs fluent information processing can profoundly affect people’s judgements and decisions. [Writers] are therefore well advised to present information in a form that facilitates easy processing: if it’s easy to read, it seems easy to do,…
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When writing for public consumption, if you follow standard usage (e.g. “for you and me”) and punctuation (e.g. “those buildings’ windows), you’ll always be safe. If you deviate (e.g. “for you and I” or “those building’s windows”), you run the risk of being perceived an illiterate.
A prudent person doesn’t jeopardize his or her future.