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This post has appeared before. It’s a different set of students today. And a different university this time. But much remains the same… Many people believe you have to choose between experience and theory when you want to gain knowledge or skills. But the choice represents a false dichotomy. It’s on my mind today as I…
When a business professional needs to influence other people to do something not obviously beneficial to them, the individual often writes a persuasive document. That’s why we have proposals, business plans, recommendation reports, white papers, etc. Because such documents present complex information, they are usually lengthy. But readers are busy! So writers need to provide their audience with a way…
The Center for Plain Language recently released final grades for US federal agencies. After completing a rigorous evaluation process, they concluded that Participation by agencies in the Center for Plain Language Federal Plain Language Report Card reached an all-time high: 23 agencies submitted materials for review, including all 15 Cabinet-level departments. Compliance scores increased overall: Eight…
To honor our US veterans today, let me share an example of exemplary writing practice from the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA). A team working on a form wanted to use the question, “When were you last (gainfully) employed?” They felt that the term “gainfully employed” would gather more legally sufficient and accurate information than just…
I’m in Seattle at the Association for Business Communication conference. Erin Kane and I will present “Reader Perception of Workplace-Writer Attributes” this afternoon. (Our fellow researchers, Nicole Amare and Alan Manning couldn’t make the trip.) We had more than 600 working adults in the US tell us whether they preferred the more plain or less…
Today’s post is in honor of the National Day on Writing. U.S. students spend years writing essays. They believe they know how to write. (And also often believe that writing is meaningless.) What they do not know is that different rhetorical contexts (different goals, audiences, content) give rise to different ways of organizing and presenting information in effective written messages.…
We are regularly asked whether our flagship book Trees, maps, and theorems is available in PDF or any other electronic format. (No, it isn’t, and if you own a copy, you can probably guess why.) Recently, a reader asked me about the e-book movement. A difficult question: ebooks have definite advantages, yet I find I am skeptical, perhaps because I value visual structure so much.
Recent winner of five Academy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, and three Golden Globes, Michel Hazanavicius’s
2011 silent movie The Artist must have done some things right.
Besides providing viewing pleasure to many of us, it reminds us
of three basic principles of effective communication.
After a visit to Saint Petersburg, my friend Marc Parisel sent me a picture of a delightful set of signs—a perfect reminder of the intrinsic limitations of visual representations. Essentially, pictures are always ambiguous and condemned to be concrete.