Paragraph construction affects whether — and how fast — readers get a writer’s intended meaning. But getting the visual units (white space surrounding lines of text) to match the semantic units (what linguists call “episodes” made up of sentences) in a message isn’t that easy. Research shows readers aren’t good at dividing a document back into the…
Efficiency. One of the greatest challenges for amateur workplace writers, who have not yet wrapped their heads around the fact that their colleagues do not read like teachers do. I’ve made the point many times that teachers are obligated to read their students’ documents thoughtfully. And that workplace readers actually read the same way writers…
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…
I could not stop myself. Food and editing! This photo of a pilcrow pretzel by Windell Oskay is too funny. Since a pilcrow is the symbol editors use to say “start new paragraph here,” it’s appropriate for today’s post. Here’s a pic that might make the symbol more recognizable. If not, you learned something new today! I…