“Carefully defined writing activities” in a learning situation have an even less direct relationship to “writing” than “pasturized process cheese food” has to “cheese.”
This wonderful quote comes from a post by Professor E. Shelley Reid on the Writng Program Administrator’s listserv last April. Professor Reid was involved in a discussion of Automated Essay Scoring (AES), which I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago.
A comment on What counts as good advice when writing a sales letter led me to today’s post about evidence. (Thanks, Ambrose.) The quality of evidence tells me what I should believe — what we know — about sales letters. I’ll do my best to avoid heady philosophy here, but paying attention to knowledge means…
I’ve been talking about the role of writing for professionals for nearly 25 years. My “talk” has always taken place in a university classroom or an academic journal. I’m not ready to stop talking in those contexts, but I am tired of their constraints. So why not talk with fewer (or at least different) constraints here? There are things…
About a year ago, I posted Kitty, ABC, and beautiful locations when I learned that the Association for Business Communication (ABC) chose me as the winner of the Kitty O. Locker Outstanding Researcher Award. I’ve just returned from New Orleans where I attended the ABC’s annual convention and had the privilege of addressing the convention audience in a plenary address titled “What is outstanding…
For National Grammar Day, I’m posting a slightly edited version of “Shibboleths and entering the professions,” which appeared on Pros Write back in 2012. I wrote the original in response to the raised eyebrows after I posted “Language choices can be unsuccessful — but never wrong.” For some readers, my belief that language can never…
This post follows up on some conversation about the meaning of “specialist” after my On Being a Writing Specialist a few days ago. I had always used “specialist” and “pro” and “expert” interchangeably. That will change now that I’ve done some more reading and reflecting. I knew I would have to define what I mean by “pro”…
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,…
