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Who is the audience for a university website?
As the academic year begins in US institutions of higher learning . . . I couldn’t resist sharing this comic from xkcd. Last year, faculty in my College were in an uproar over a redesigned website created for an external audience. The furor has died down now that most of the content for the internal…

Pros don’t settle for platitudes about audience
Know your audience! The most common platitude about workplace writing. Well . . . duh . . . who could argue with that? It certainly doesn’t describe what pros have learned. What amateurs need is GUIDANCE for getting to know the right things about their readers. My guidance, based on a chapter new to the third edition of Revising Professional Writing, focuses…

Friday fun with the history of writing
Writing is a 5,000-year-old technology developed for commercial purposes like keeping a record of agricultural products. Ancient Scripts is an awesome resource to learn more about the world’s writing systems. This TED Ed lesson is a brief introduction. Speaking came thousands of years before writing. All writing that has developed since its invention can be traced…

Bama students are #1 in more than football
Bama is known for its success in football, winning another national championship last night. That’s two in a row and 15 total (depending on who is counting). What is less well known outside of the Deep South, is that there were other national championship teams on our campus in 2012: softball, women’s golf, and women’s gymnastics — also for…

Kudos to Google. And the Center for Plain Language.
Yesterday, Time.com reported that Google ranked #1 for their privacy policy. The Center for Plain Language judged how well 7 big tech firms followed plain-language guidelines. A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear that the intended readers can easily find what they need, understand what they find,…

Friday fun with lame punctuation humor
Happy Friday!
They got to be kidding. “No deadlines”? My professors seem to have deadlines to meet.
And don’t tell the professors over in the studio courses (those who need to operate heavy machinery and/or hazardous substances) that there are no environmental hazards. In any art setting one of the first things you get told is always “safety.”
And we’ve not even touched science or engineering yet.
Those guys at CNBC are absolutely clueless.
Forbes ran the same story at http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/01/03/the-least-stressful-jobs-of-2013/ — apparently lifted from one found at CareerCast. VERY sloppy journalism!
Wow, this sheds an entirely new light on the credibility of those career sites. If even a student like me can see that the article is almost 100% fact free and yet they published it as if it were a neutral, objective article, I wonder whether we can believe anything on those sites. We’re not even talking about taking them with a grain of salt here…
Preach it, sister! I love the points you make here (and the way that you make them). When I posted my blog post on this Forbes article http://wp.me/p2VVAw-Y, I didn’t expect to meet a colleague at the same university who was also a blogger and would address this topic. Nice to “meet” you.
Hello! Strange that we had to “meet” here. The online world is a strange place!