I recommend Gavin’s post about pie charts — especially for his “makeover”!
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- I give up, I am embracing pie charts (simplystatistics.org)
I recommend Gavin’s post about pie charts — especially for his “makeover”!
My technical editing students are working on a developmental edit on some assembly instructions from Ikea. To help them make good recommendations, we’ve been discussing how to help content creators address the readers’ readiness for that content. Readiness is a concept borrowed from leadership research (the Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership theory) to describe how able and…
One of the most important things any teacher or manager can do to help amateurs become pro writers is to discuss sample messages with them. The key here is discussing the sample message in sufficient, relevant detail and connecting those details to future messages the writer will create.** Here are the guidelines I’ve provided before to those introducing…
I don’t know people who read at work for fun. They read because they need help doing their jobs. That means they’re looking for documents they can USE. Few things make a document more usable than format. (I’m talking about white space, typography, etc.) Revising Professional Writing devotes a chapter to this topic. I’ve been using short…
No grammatical construction raises the ire of writing “experts” like the passive. Geoff Pullum (a regular contributor to Lingua Franca at the Chronicle of Higher Education) provided two marvelous examples in a research paper titled “Fear and loathing of the English passive.” The passive voice liquidates and buries the active individual, along with most of the awful…
. . . to understand what influences writing quality in the workplace. Everyone has an opinion. And it usually focuses on blaming someone else. The public, through their legislators, blames educators. Educators blame legislators. Or businesses. And businesses blame both. What truly happens? I mentioned my interest in this topic a year ago in Why…
I’m in Seattle at the Association for Business Communication conference. Erin Kane and I will present “Reader Perception of Workplace-Writer Attributes” this afternoon. (Our fellow researchers, Nicole Amare and Alan Manning couldn’t make the trip.) We had more than 600 working adults in the US tell us whether they preferred the more plain or less…
Kim,
Thanks for the repost. I am glad you liked it.
Gavin