If you’re writing to readers from Western cultures, don’t make them wait! Western attention spans are short. We value efficiency–most of the time. But I need to explain when efficiency is (and isn’t) paramount to offer helpful guidance. Here’s my point in this post: Delay only if your point meets all the following criteria for…
A quick story…I was working from home on slides for a presentation this afternoon. As I got ready to head to campus, my phone alerted me to a text message from a co-worker: This state needs to invest in trucks. And salt. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow! It took a minute, but I finally figured out the campus was…
I have argued that sentence variety is the enemy of efficiency. People read more accurately and efficiently when all the elements of a document are tightly connected. This includes the connection between consecutive sentences. I refer to this as cohesion (sometimes referred to as Functional Sentence Perspective by linguists). My experience is that most adults are able to create cohesive prose…
Readers understand a message better when writers use explicit signals of what they want readers to get out of a document. Transitions like “unfortunately” are one type of explicit signal. (Headings are another — see Think long-term and be kind to readers with well-formatted documents.) In fact, transitions are also sometimes called logical connectives. Maybe that makes…
It’s something of a paradox. But the space you leave blank in your documents matters. Compare these two forms discussed in an article about the importance of white space by the Nielsen Norman Group. (They help clients make users of their websites, applications, and products happier.) As the article says, The recreated Walgreens.com registration form (right) is…
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…
Paragraph construction affects whether — and how fast — readers get a writer’s intended meaning. But getting the visual units (white space surrounding lines of text) to match the semantic units (what linguists call “episodes” made up of sentences) in a message isn’t that easy. Research shows readers aren’t good at dividing a document back into the…
I’m reorganizing some materials published earlier on Pros Write. And I’m starting with bottom line placement because no guidance for writing successfully at work is more important. If you want to win readers’ gratitude. . . If you want them to see you as competent and respectful. . . Then state your bottom line message…
Travis, a former student who now works as an IT consultant, asked for a summary of what we taught him about developing and organizing content in emails ’cause he wants to share it with his project leaders. (Seems they had asked him how he knew what the majority of new grads don’t.) Although I’ve written…
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…