Friday fun with lame punctuation humor
Happy Friday!
Similar Posts
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…
Plain language in the news
Check out Huffington Post‘s “The new illiteracy — obfuscation — hinders progress.” The author mentions some top notch plain language efforts like the Center for Plain Language and PLAIN. But he assumes obfuscation is a recent problem. I wrote a very brief history of the problem in Why hasn’t plain language become the norm? Related…
How to write like a (wo)man at work
Thanks to Linguistics Research Digest for pointing me toward a recent study showing that men and women use different writing styles (word choices and sentence structures). This is significant for a couple of reasons. First, the differences have been documented in speech rather than writing prior to this research. Second, and most importantly, the female…
Which federal agencies made the grade?
The Center for Plain Language just released their 2014 Federal Plain Language Report Card. Highest grades went to Homeland Security, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Social Security Administration. In their white paper, they note that the quality of writing within the US federal government is improving. • 16 out of 22 departments improved over last year’s grades….
Ideas are nothing without action
I love The Onion. And I love TED Talks. So I was tickled when my buddy, Erin Kane, a law professor who teaches legal writing and rhetorical analysis, shared this video one of her students found yesterday. What’s equally great is that the student, Troy Thresher, wrote: “I found myself analyzing the rhetorical commitments and strategies…
Friday fun with the punctuation support group
Click on the cartoon to get the right size for reading. Happy Friday everyone!
