In case you missed it, you really should watch John Oliver making fun of GM‘s attempts to control the language of those discussing their millions of defective (in their prescribed words, “does not perform to design”) vehicles. Last week, USA Today picked up on the Detroit Free Press piece titled GM’s banned words: What’s wrong with using…
For the next two days, I’m excited to be visiting my alma mater to lead a workshop sponsored by LSU’s Master of Science in Analytics program in the Ourso College of Business. If you are curious about the agenda or materials, check out 3 Things You Need To Know About Writing in the Workplace.
Lots of folks advocate the use of the STAR (Situation, Task, Action/Activity, Results) method for handling questions during job interviews. See this recent piece at The Guardian or this piece from Huffington Post. Utilizing the STAR Method in Your Resume & Interviews from the Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida makes it clear that…
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 a couple of days late with this nod to April Fool’s Day fun. The folks at Google Chrome helped us celebrate with this tongue-in-cheek video about emoji, which the Oxford Dictionaries say originated in the 1990s from Japanese: e ‘picture’ + moji ‘letter, character’. Believe it or not. Moby Dick has actually been translated into…
Found at Linguistics Girl . . .
You’ve heard me say how important reader testing is when you truly care about meeting the needs of your audience. The Before and After Gallery hosted by the DigitalGov User Experience Program provides some terrific examples. [6/16/14 Update: examples appear to have moved to Government Usability Case Studies.] After watching some representative readers use the Fueleconomy.gov Mobile…
Doge is funny, in part, because doge’s style is odd. As in not quite human. In other words, Doge’s language calls attention to itself. One of the explanations for odd-sounding style is called selectional restriction. Because the kind of attention doge elicits is obviously undesirable in workplace writing, selectional restriction is one of the topics covered briefly…
It’s hard for researchers to avoid lengthy noun phrases. Often those phrases are a jumble for readers to interpret without hyphens. I promised some guidance to the doctoral students in my seminar on scholarly communication this semester. Here goes . . . The topic of hyphens came up because, in the past couple of weeks, my…
What a terrific initiative!