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…
If you need to make business case for creating higher quality documents in your workplace, check out the cost calculators from Eclectic. You can calculate the daily and annual costs of ineffective emails. the cost of creating a specific document. the annual cost for you to write documents. It’s worth reminding you of two other resources for making…
Check it out. The Center for Plain Language just released this 2013 report card for plain writing done by federal agencies. Details are available from their website. Two related media articles appear below. Sure makes me wonder what’s different in the USDA (Dept of Agriculture) and the DOL (Dept of Labor). Related articles The Worst…
. . . to understand what influences writing quality in the workplace. Everyone has an opinion. And it usually focuses on blaming someone else. The public, through their legislators, blames educators. Educators blame legislators. Or businesses. And businesses blame both. What truly happens? I mentioned my interest in this topic a year ago in Why…
TEDEd brings us short lessons on many subjects. There are currently eight lessons in the TEDEd Playing with Language series. That’s where I found one called How did English Evolve that explains why some words are less “plain” than others. So I flipped it to create my own lesson related to plain language. (It’s a very simple process.)…
I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. Nothing signals your status as a pro workplace writer as much as testing an important document with representative readers before you deliver it. But reader testing can be expensive. You need equipment and training to conduct eye-tracking studies. Thanks to two of my Dutch colleagues, Menno de Jong…
Check out Huffington Post‘s “The new illiteracy — obfuscation — hinders progress.” The author mentions some top notch plain language efforts like the Center for Plain Language and PLAIN. But he assumes obfuscation is a recent problem. I wrote a very brief history of the problem in Why hasn’t plain language become the norm? Related…
If I need a lawyer, I’m gonna call up Mr. Kaplitt. Here’s a letter he wrote for a client who received a “cease and desist” letter written in indecipherable legalese. Huffington Post posted a short video about this one. Or read his letter for yourself. Bet Mr. Kaplitt’s phone has been ringing off the hook! Related…
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…
A while back, the folks at Write in New Zealand talked about punctuating bullet lists. The post caught my attention because their practice is refreshingly straightforward. If the stem sentence and the list items are all complete sentences, we punctuate with an initial capital and a full stop. If the stem sentence is an introductory…