Friday fun with tearable puns
Found at Linguistics Girl . . .
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Warren Buffett, pro writer
I was reading my digitial issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) this morning and found Ben Yagoda’s Warren Buffett Is a Better Writer Than I Am. Damn It. (Yagoda is one of a handful of contributors to CHE’s Lingua Franca blog.) The piece is a terrific analysis of Buffet’s writing ability based on his recent Letter…
Learn to identify needless words and promote clarity
A couple of months back, Forbes.com published 10 Tips For Better Business Writing. Tip #3 was “Omit needless words.” The author echoed the time-honored advice of William Strunk, Jr., in The Elements of Style published by Cornell University, where he worked as an English professor, in 1919. (You may be more familiar with later editions of the book by Strunk…
Are corporate values connected to plain language adoption?
I think so. At least this email from the lead writer at Pinterest to all company employees supports the connection. It is too good not to share. (See my series on what plain language is for background.) Because of my current research on workplace writing quality, I’ve been thinking about how to capture the qualities of organizations…
Friday fun with malapropisms
I’ve written about malapropisms before. If you want a diversion that involves word play with malapropisms today, try this game from Oxford Dictionaries. Example: The muscles around the stomach are known as the abominable muscles. Answer: Abdominal (‘abominable’ means ‘detestable’). A prospectus is someone who searches for gold. After a long air flight, it is reassuring to get your feet back…
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…
What does it mean for plain language when employees equal “costs”?
No time to explore this in detail today, but Henry Blodget, editor of Business Insider, is getting a lot of attention for his article “This one tweet reveals what’s wrong with American Business.” The bottom line here is that Henry believes US corporations think only about the short term. If that’s true, plain language efforts…
