In honor of International Plain Language Day, I’ll address a common concern about using plain language when writing at work. Will plain style make your audience think less of you? With my colleagues, I’ve published two studies that answer your question. The published sources are listed at the end of this post. The bottom line:…
The terrific Leslie O’Flahavan, owner of E-WRITE, and I recently held our first LinkedIn Live broadcast of Fix This Writing! Two Experts Show How to Make Bad Writing Better. Watch the recording and view the writing we discussed below. The idea behind our broadcast is to take an example of not-very-good writing, explain why it’s…
I’m in Seattle at the Association for Business Communication conference. Erin Kane and I will present “Reader Perception of Workplace-Writer Attributes” this afternoon. (Our fellow researchers, Nicole Amare and Alan Manning couldn’t make the trip.) We had more than 600 working adults in the US tell us whether they preferred the more plain or less…
Today’s post is in honor of the National Day on Writing. U.S. students spend years writing essays. They believe they know how to write. (And also often believe that writing is meaningless.) What they do not know is that different rhetorical contexts (different goals, audiences, content) give rise to different ways of organizing and presenting information in effective written messages….
Yesterday in “The big grammar quiz of 2014,” the UK’s Management Today published a terrific piece about grammar in workplace writing. Test yourself with their quiz. Then review your score with their key, which includes thoughtful and accurate explanations. If you rely on Strunk and White’s classic, The Elements of Style, you will resist those explanations. But…
I have been trying to avoid thinking about today’s “holiday,” but Nancy Friedman has captured my attention. Punctuation is indeed both relevant and interesting in today’s workplace. My own Nat'l Punctuation Day linkfest: punctuation in company names and logos. http://t.co/fFCEAorHZ7 @FYI @andcompany_ @sfciti — Nancy Friedman 🦗 (@Fritinancy) September 24, 2014
I’ve been meaning to send you over to this grammar quiz from James Harbeck. But first let me remind you to avoid listening to any “expert” who focuses on limiting your stylistic choices by telling you to “avoid passives.” Here are the items you must judge as passive — or not. An accidental discharge of…
Not very. I read about some interesting research last spring and meant to write more about it then. Here’s the bottom line. The researchers evaluated 9 of the most commonly used formulas. Here’s how Willingham summarizes their findings: All of the readability formulas were more accurate for higher ability than lower ability students. But only one—the…
A couple of months back, Forbes.com published 10 Tips For Better Business Writing. Tip #3 was “Omit needless words.” The author echoed the time-honored advice of William Strunk, Jr., in The Elements of Style published by Cornell University, where he worked as an English professor, in 1919. (You may be more familiar with later editions of the book by Strunk…
Thanks to Linguistics Research Digest for pointing me toward a recent study showing that men and women use different writing styles (word choices and sentence structures). This is significant for a couple of reasons. First, the differences have been documented in speech rather than writing prior to this research. Second, and most importantly, the female…