I’m back (after an extreme hiatus from blogging). Because I’m teaching a new graduate course on style for technical writers, I thought I’d share some of the content I’ve been developing here. If you’d rather watch/listen than read, here’s my 19-minute lecture. Should professional technical communicators still care about writing style? Despite the fact that…
Editing should maximize the likelihood the purpose of the content creator’s message is achieved. If the content is supposed to inform, then the audience must be able to comprehend it. If the content is intended to direct, then the audience must comprehend it and also be willing and able to use it. This means editors…
Tomorrow, my technical editing students at the University of North Texas begin discussing editorial decision-making. The rhetorical context within which content is created is critical to good editorial decisions. Although the video below was created for professionals who write, I’m using it to teach editors how to think about purpose in nonfiction content. The video…
Today’s post is in honor of the National Day on Writing. U.S. students spend years writing essays. They believe they know how to write. (And also often believe that writing is meaningless.) What they do not know is that different rhetorical contexts (different goals, audiences, content) give rise to different ways of organizing and presenting information in effective written messages….
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. …
[This post should have appeared on October 13 to acknowledge International Plain Language Day. More important, it should have appeared AFTER parts one and two.] 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…
The 4th edition of Revising Professional Writing in Science and Technology, Business, and the Social Sciences is now available. It’s an affordable workbook at $39.95 USD, with over 400 revision and editing problems. Instructors get an answer key plus supplements here on Pros Write (e.g., sample documents, videos, etc.) supporting the principles in the book. Each of the 21 chapters…
The 2nd edition of Thinking and Interacting Like a Leader: The TILL System for Leadership Communication is now available as an ebook on Google Play. The book is a concise guide to help current and future managers become better leaders by building their personal power. In a nutshell, the TILL system teaches you to manage tone when you…
A few days ago, Lee Salz published Help! My salespeople can’t write! He notes that writing skill has become critical because business-to-business selling involves lots of emails and electronic documents, where face-to-face and phone conversations used to prevail. Salz summarizes a test for assessing a job candidate’s writing skills that is worth sharing. As a final…
Know your audience. This would count as a platitude for good writing without some specifics. So this post provides a specific system for analyzing a workplace audience. That system requires writers to assess two aspects of their situation–the context of their message: (1) their relationship with the audience and (2) their audience’s readiness to accept the message. An…