A sales letter (or email) is designed to entice a reader to become a customer of the writer. The most common approach to training writers to create a sales letter is called AIDA, standing for Attention Interest Desire Action It was developed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis based on his practical advertising experience in the US before the…
If you need evidence that people feel passionately about language, check out a plain language summary of research published by Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics at Monash University in Australia. The summary appeared today in the Linguistics Research Digest, a terrific resource for locating more than platitudes about communication. Their goal is “to provide up-to-date reports on the…
Miss me? I hope those of you in the US enjoyed the Thanksgiving holiday as much as I did. We traveled to my childhood home in Lyons, Nebraska to visit my family. For the first time in at least six months, I unplugged for an ENTIRE week. I needed the break. I submitted our College’s massive accreditation…
The ability to communicate clear messages in writing is critical for the success of individuals in the workplace and the organizations they represent — though I have argued that plain language is only one of the communication strategies a pro must master. There are gads of folks who condemn business and government for creating ineffective documents and who advocate clear…
Yesterday, over at As a Linguist, Leonore Rodrigues pointed out an interesting writing challenge for international students studying in the US. What do you think the greatest obstacle is for non-native English speakers who must write academic essays at US colleges/universities? It is NOT use of idioms, vocabulary, or English grammar. It relates to cultural genre differences in content development…
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”…
I have used the term “genre” — even in the titles of a few blog posts — a number of times. But I realized a couple of days ago that I have never explicitly defined the concept here. My bad! Most people are familiar with the word’s use in the context of music. If you use…
One of the most important things any teacher or manager can do to help amateurs become pro writers is to discuss sample messages with them. The key here is discussing the sample message in sufficient, relevant detail and connecting those details to future messages the writer will create.** Here are the guidelines I’ve provided before to those introducing…
Yesterday’s post, Language choices can be unsuccessful — but never wrong, raised a few eyebrows. For some of you, my belief that language can never be wrong contradicts with my belief that I can prepare students for writing successfully in the workplace. The apparent contradition deserves an explanation. So today’s post is about grammar rules. (I’ll get…
I shared my position on the use of short lectures in a writing class a couple of days ago. But I told only part of the story from the video lecture-tutorial + teaching note that will be published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Education. The amateurs in my courses depend on me to make a professional’s tacit…