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…
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…
For National Grammar Day, I’m posting a slightly edited version of “Shibboleths and entering the professions,” which appeared on Pros Write back in 2012. I wrote the original in response to the raised eyebrows after I posted “Language choices can be unsuccessful — but never wrong.” For some readers, my belief that language can never…
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…
Today, I’m following up on a short post about the use of the word abrasive in performance reviews for women. Similar discussions of word choice in student evaluations of college professors have been a hot topic in the past week. See Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant in the New York Times. Or in Inside Higher…
Wanted to share this piece from Fast Company even though I have no time to elaborate today. (Tip o’ the hat to Marie Paretti for sharing it!) Those of you who write performance reviews for women need to reflect on your word choice. And what it says about you! The answer = abrasive.
The Center for Plain Language just released their 2014 Federal Plain Language Report Card. Highest grades went to Homeland Security, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Social Security Administration. In their white paper, they note that the quality of writing within the US federal government is improving. • 16 out of 22 departments improved over last year’s grades….
My colleague, Burcu, sent me the link to this recent Forbes piece by Liz Ryan on why people writing things like as per my message and it has come to my attention. It’s a good read so I tweeted about it. If you missed it, here's a good explanation from @forbes for why people write zombie…
This post continues my series on research articles (RAs). This time I’m addressing the all-important response to RA reviews. Mastering this genre is critical for anyone whose job includes publication in peer-reviewed journals. (If you want a little background, see this post.) When resubmitting a revised RA for potential publication, the authors must include a response…