When should you delay stating your bottom line message?
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When should you delay stating your bottom line message?

Rarely. That’s how often you should delay when writing to readers from Western cultures. Our attention span is short. We value efficiency. We want to know your bottom line first. Then we’ll decide whether to keep reading. (I’m assuming your goal is to communicate a point clearly to your audience.) But telling you it’s rarely…

What do your format choices mean to readers?
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What do your format choices mean to readers?

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,…

Want satisfied workplace readers? Give them an efficient reading experience
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Want satisfied workplace readers? Give them an efficient reading experience

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…

Pros avoid sexist language
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Pros avoid sexist language

Within Western culture, there are few workplaces with ONLY men or ONLY women. In theory, our workplaces are gender neutral. Our language, however, sometimes perpetuates a world in which women are subservient to men. Sexist language is commonly characterized using six issues: pseudo-generic pronoun, he (e.g., When an employee asks for a raise, he should be brief.) pseudo-generic noun,…

What is plain language? (Part One: Elements of the text)
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What is plain language? (Part One: Elements of the text)

One of the comments to How Do Your Sell Plain Language to Your Manager? insisted that a software program called StyleWriter is the key to management support for more successful writing in the workplace. I want to respond to that recommendation. But I realized that the commenter and I understand “plain language” differently. So I’m going to…

Pros plan message organization strategically
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Pros plan message organization strategically

This post follows up on a couple of earlier ones about a letter soliciting sponsorships for an outdoor sign at The First Tee of Tuscaloosa. Pros don’t settle for platitudes about audience described the principled way in which we analyzed our audience.  Pros plan message content strategically described how we developed the content for the first draft. This one describes…

Amateurs need explicit knowledge — not platitudes
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Amateurs need explicit knowledge — not platitudes

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…

The video tutorial on paragraph unity
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The video tutorial on paragraph unity

Pros know that chunking related text in their documents makes it easier for readers to get their message. Writers have been using visual signals to create textual chunks since the ancient Greeks. The photo is a page from Ælfric’s Grammar, written in the second half of the 11th century, with large initials and both Latin and Anglo-Saxon script. I found it…