Those offering advice to professionals who write have long suggested that similar ideas should appear in similar (or parallel) form. In fact, the advice appears in one of the earliest business writing textbooks, first published in the U.S. in 1916. But I’m committed to offering you guidance for writing successfully at work based on quality evidence about the…
A couple of months back, Forbes.com published 10 Tips For Better Business Writing. Tip #3 was “Omit needless words.” The author echoed the time-honored advice of William Strunk, Jr., in The Elements of Style published by Cornell University, where he worked as an English professor, in 1919. (You may be more familiar with later editions of the book by Strunk…
When you can’t perceive the variation in pitch between different musical notes, you’re considered tone deaf. That’s how the Napa Valley Register labeled the four writers of the flyer at right in 9/11 memorial flyer offensive and tone-deaf. So you can also be tagged as tone deaf if you can’t perceive the variation in attitudes conveyed through different…
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…
I regularly advise writers to use grammatical parallelism and visual formatting to influence document quality. (Use the links if you don’t know what I mean.) But I saw some evidence presented by colleagues at a recent conference that led me to refine that advice. Here’s the bottom line for those who don’t want the details: Use…
Do you offer grammar advice to others? I urge you to read 12 mistakes nearly everyone who writes about grammar makes to insure you’re not repeating common mistakes. Jonathon Owen, blogger at Arrant Pedantry (and also a linguist, writer, and editor) knows what he’s talking about. To me, the most serious mistake self-proclaimed “specialists” make is…
I’ve said before that advice to ban the passive voice counts as a platitude. A recently published study corroborates my point. The authors of that study wrote, [Advice to ban the passive voice] implies that the active and passive voice can be used interchangeably and, where grammatically possible, the active voice should always be favoured. Their results show…
TEDEd brings us short lessons on many subjects. There are currently eight lessons in the TEDEd Playing with Language series. That’s where I found one called How did English Evolve that explains why some words are less “plain” than others. So I flipped it to create my own lesson related to plain language. (It’s a very simple process.)…
There’s been buzz about the use of emoticons like the smiley face 🙂 or wink 😉 in the workplace. A New York Times article in 2011. Huffington Post took on the topic in a 2011 article and again in this 2012 article. A post by Gemma Stoyle at Linguistics Research Digest spurred my thinking about what emoticons mean and when they’re appropriate. Research by Eli…
We naturally adapt our language based on our social surroundings: we choose different words to describe the same thing when addressing our pals in a pub, our professor at a pub, our professor in class, or our grandmother on the phone. I’ve written about this before as code-switching. When code-switching appears in written language, some folks experience…