A couple of months ago, the CMO of a tech startup shared Surviving Email Politics at Work via LinkedIn. Email is an extension of you, part of your reputation. What you say and how you conduct yourself over email is the professional “you.” Managing this carefully is important. I couldn’t say it better. Today, I’m…
Not very. I read about some interesting research last spring and meant to write more about it then. Here’s the bottom line. The researchers evaluated 9 of the most commonly used formulas. Here’s how Willingham summarizes their findings: All of the readability formulas were more accurate for higher ability than lower ability students. But only one—the…
I’m celebrating my 2nd anniversary on Pros Write with a story about how people read. I’ve used this fable for many, many years in classes and workshops to get people to think about the way people read in the real world. And the importance of a plain language approach to writing. The Geologist’s Trousers …
I’m in the early phase of a research project designed to describe what influences writing quality in the workplace. Everyone has an opinion. And it usually focuses on blaming someone else. The public, through their legislators, blames educators. Or businesses. Individual writers blame educators, too. In fact, it’s popular to blame educators! Educators blame legislators….
Because documents are performances and great performers can teach us what it takes to deliver a great performance, I have used that theme to create a short (3:48) cartoon. My goal is to get people, mostly amateurs ( . . . beginners), to think about the amount and kind of WORK involved in being a…
Today I’m sharing a recording of “Plain by Design: Evidence-based Plain Language,” the talk given by Karen Schriver at PLAIN2013. PLAIN is one of the international organizations working to promote quality workplace writing. There is a short bio on the conference website if you’re unfamiliar with Karen’s work. We share the same philosophy: better workplace writing through guidelines…
If you need to make business case for creating higher quality documents in your workplace, check out the cost calculators from Eclectic. You can calculate the daily and annual costs of ineffective emails. the cost of creating a specific document. the annual cost for you to write documents. It’s worth reminding you of two other resources for making…
Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz summarize the implications of some recent psychological research on format this way: Any variable that facilitates or impairs fluent information processing can profoundly affect people’s judgements and decisions. [Writers] are therefore well advised to present information in a form that facilitates easy processing: if it’s easy to read, it seems easy to do,…
My colleague, Saul Carliner, shared this slide deck from Mark O-Toole about why new grads don’t get hired. See if you can locate one of the eleven reasons that isn’t caused by (or couldn’t be fixed with better) communication. Congratulations Graduate! Eleven Reasons Why I Will Never Hire You. from Mark O’Toole Here’s my analysis….
Efficiency. One of the greatest challenges for amateur workplace writers, who have not yet wrapped their heads around the fact that their colleagues do not read like teachers do. I’ve made the point many times that teachers are obligated to read their students’ documents thoughtfully. And that workplace readers actually read the same way writers…