I recently discovered Leslie O’Flahavan’s Writing Matters blog and thought I’d share her analysis of some bad writing. Follow the link to see how she re-wrote the email. I look forward to reading more of Leslie’s work. Text of Customer Service Email Leslie Explains Why This is Bad Customer Service Writing Click on the Links for…
One of my colleagues recently asked me for resources on writing white papers for a corporate friend who is confident in his ability to write short recommendation reports, but believes longer ones — white papers — are increasingly important for corporate success although he hasn’t had experience writing them. I was most familiar with white papers…
I’ve said before that advice to ban the passive voice counts as a platitude. A recently published study corroborates my point. The authors of that study wrote, [Advice to ban the passive voice] implies that the active and passive voice can be used interchangeably and, where grammatically possible, the active voice should always be favoured. Their results show…
‘Cause my day job kept me from blogging this week, I’m reprinting a wonderful article by James Harbeck: You’re using that dash wrong: A comprehensive guide to our language’s horizontal lines — from the humble hyphen to the three-em dash. It’s worth a few minutes! Published in The Week on September 10, 2013 Ah, the dash…
. . . 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…
Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz summarize the implications of some recent psychological research on format this way: Any variable that facilitates or impairs fluent information processing can profoundly affect people’s judgements and decisions. [Writers] are therefore well advised to present information in a form that facilitates easy processing: if it’s easy to read, it seems easy to do,…
Matthew Stibbe, a marketing writer, inspired this post with his Fast, good or cheap? Choose two. Anyone who manages the process for creating a product can use this mantra to describe their constraints. Here’s the perspective from a musician. And one from a graphic designer. So here’s how I would explain the situation from the perspective of a…
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…
Has anyone given you grief over splitting an infinitive in your writing? If so, they would claim “to better understand” is wrong because the adverb better appears between to and the verb understand. The “rule” to avoid splitting infinitives originated in the 18th century due to a faulty comparison of English with Latin. (For more…
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…