Those offering advice to professionals who write have long suggested that similar ideas should appear in similar (or parallel) form. In fact, the advice appears in one of the earliest business writing textbooks, first published in the U.S. in 1916. But I’m committed to offering you guidance for writing successfully at work based on quality evidence about the…
I regularly advise writers to use grammatical parallelism and visual formatting to influence document quality. (Use the links if you don’t know what I mean.) But I saw some evidence presented by colleagues at a recent conference that led me to refine that advice. Here’s the bottom line for those who don’t want the details: Use…
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…