Know your audience! The most common platitude about workplace writing. Well . . . duh . . . who could argue with that? It certainly doesn’t describe what pros have learned. What amateurs need is GUIDANCE for getting to know the right things about their readers. My guidance, based on a chapter new to the third edition of Revising Professional Writing, focuses…
The fact that the people in this photo are arranged with similar visual structure (in rows with the same color and design of clothing) is one of the main reasons you can quickly pick out a “team.” (The other reason has to do with spatial proximity.) The use of similarity to impose order the chaotic…
Amateurs rarely appreciate the (lack of) commitment of workplace readers. It’s another one of the consequences of the fact that, as students, they have prepared documents only for teachers, who are required to read thoughtfully whatever their students write and who have no real use for the content in those documents. Amateurs don’t often recognize that everyone else…
Core. Essence. Kernel. Heart. Crux. When applied to a document, these terms refer to its bottom line message. One of the things pro writers do is make the bottom line clear. That means they state their bottom line explicitly. And more than once in a long or complex document. The other thing pros do is place their bottom line where…
Most of the world has heard that CNN and Fox News inaccurately reported the US Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Health Care Act last Thursday. Later that day, here’s how Ellen Killoran, a reporter for the International Business Times, explained their error: The egregious error does not appear to be the result of the news…
[Updated September 21, 2012 with new art ’cause I liked it better than the original.] What will the tone of your emails say about your attitude today? If you are feeling the need for a light-hearted look at tone in workplace writing, check out Toaster-Instruction Booklet Author Enraged That Editor Betrayed His Vision from The…
Attitude, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. (OK. This is not technically accurate. Psychological theory considers attitude a trait of the individual. But it is an accurate way of describing the fact that we attribute attitudes to other people.) We have been attributing attitudes to the woman in Da Vinci’s portrait for 500 years. We mostly use nonverbal cues, like…
To influence people at work, you’ll need to earn their trust (ethos) and make good arguments (logos). See yesterday’s post for more on these rhetorical terms. Evidence is the cornerstone of effective arguments. Not all evidence is equal, of course. The video tutorial I’m posting today focuses on the use of evidence, as well as several…
Most amateurs and at least some pros are willing to ascribe the unethical intentions of individuals to linguistic forms. (See my post on passive voice.) No where is this more obvious than in the case of “persuasive” language. Yes. Workplace writers can use language to market unhealthy food to the children of their customers convince government regulators…
Yesterday I made the point that workplace readers don’t read minds. It’s the writer’s job to give them the information they need to get the writer’s message. So what do pros do when they aren’t sure what their readers need to know? The smartest way to proceed is to interact with the readers BEFORE sending…