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….
A while back, I included a personal example of audience analysis. Thanks to Tom Orr for suggesting that I follow up by showing y’all the letter. I decided it might be helpful to share even more of the process — like how we developed the content for the first draft. So here goes. Purpose & Audience:…
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…
A couple of days ago, I made the point that, although professionals today need to communicate visually in workplace documents, most amateur writers have little relevant experience. If you are working on online graphics, check out amCharts, a small Lithuanian company, which was featured in Smashing Magazine a few years back. The graphic above is a still version of a JavaScript sample. …
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…
Read today’s press release from the Center for Plain language about report cards for federal agencies one year after the Plain Writing Act regulations went into effect.
Written language is visual. So the history of writing, like the Sumerian cuneiform shown here, is part of the history of visual communication. To follow that history, check out The History of Visual Communication website created by Elif Ayiter, a professor at Sabanci University in Turkey. The “tension” between words and pictures is mostly a consequence of how…
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…