“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),…
My first new post in a while. And I’m ranting — albeit somewhat quietly. This time I’m reacting to a newly published research article about assessing student writing within MOOCs. Balfour, the author, provides a review of two technologies for assessing writing when you have a huge student-to-teacher ratio: Automated Essay Scoring (AES) and Calibrated…
I’ve been struggling to understand why teaching undergraduate students to write for the workplace is so difficult since around 1988. Quite a while back, I recognized that students have to clear a psychological hurdle to succeed. I just couldn’t figure out what to call that hurdle. Until now. In a 1999 article in the Journal…
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,…
In the first two posts defining what I mean by “plain language,” I have focused on two points of the rhetorical triangle: textual elements like style and organization (Part One) and reader outcomes like comprehension and usability (Part Two). Now it’s time to tackle the third, the writer’s purpose. This is arguably the aspect of rhetorical context that…
Pros Write has been tagged for The Next Big Thing Blog Hop by the folks at EIU Writes. Thanks, Tim! His questions about my next “big thing” are answered below. 1) What is the working title of your next big writing project? What would it take to get your organization to write in plain language? (I just made this up…
In Part One of my attempt to explain how I understand plain language, I focused on the elements of a text that must be managed to create a plain language document. Anyone who has known me for long, however, could have predicted that I would talk about the rhetorical context of a high quality document in Part Two. …
One of the comments to How Do Your Sell Plain Language to Your Manager? insisted that a software program called StyleWriter is the key to management support for more successful writing in the workplace. I want to respond to that recommendation. But I realized that the commenter and I understand “plain language” differently. So I’m going to…
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 just read a Forbes piece from a while back that’s worth a minute: Why Trying to Learn Clear Writing in College is Like Trying to Learn Sobriety in a Bar. Writing education in the US does not empower our students. They are not encouraged to write in a way that communicates to workplace readers….