If you have known or followed me for long, you know I am no grammar nazi. As I wrote recently, If my students’ language signals they may not pass inside the gate where professionals reside, I never tell them they’re wrong. I do sometimes tell them their language will elicit negative attention from more than a…
I have been totally consumed with my day job the past few days. The semester starts at Bama next week. Cause I don’t want ya to think I forgot ya, I’m sending you to a nice piece by Stan Carey, who blogs at Sentence First. He talks about word choice and defines “inkhorn” and “sesquipedalianism” for…
Yesterday’s post, Language choices can be unsuccessful — but never wrong, raised a few eyebrows. For some of you, my belief that language can never be wrong contradicts with my belief that I can prepare students for writing successfully in the workplace. The apparent contradition deserves an explanation. So today’s post is about grammar rules. (I’ll get…
Research has clearly established that the vast majority of US business readers notice only two punctuation infelicities — even in formal documents. Today I am sharing a video tutorial to help those amateurs who struggle with the two issues that elicit the most negative attention: comma splices: using a comma to mark a sentence boundary sentence fragments:…
The Harvard Business Review blog network recently featured a piece by Kyle Wiens called I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why. Wiens runs two companies, and both focus on technical communication. But he makes a good argument about why what he calls “grammar” matters in any workplace. Grammar is relevant for all companies. Yes, language…
Because I have had to keep my administrative hat on a lot recently (I am working toward an August 1 deadline for a university report), it took a while to get the video tutorial on word choice complete. It was designed to help amateurs think about the choice of vocabulary in workplace documents thoughtfully, intentionally, and strategically….
Amateurs often attribute the unethical intentions of individuals to the language those individuals use. Jargon is a case in point. Is jargon bad or evil or wrong? If you read my posts on passive voice and persuasion, you know I see considerable confusion between the tool itself and the intent of the person using it. So I see…
Julia Williams, President of the Professional Communication Society (and one of my favorite colleagues) has negotiated a deal to offer a free eLearning course on leadership communication to IEEE members. Details are available in Julia’s Monthly eNotice. IEEE offers 3 CEUs (or professional development hours) for successful completion of the course. I created the content for…
Thanks (again) to the Center for Plain Language, I found a terrific story of the process pros use to manage the creation of a document with a very large and heterogenous audience. Check out the infographic timeline at the Know Before You Owe site (under “How we did it”). It describes the process used by Kleimann Communication Group…
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…