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Grades for plain language at US agencies
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...
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Here’s a tool for calculating the costs of writing at work
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...
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Thanksgiving preparation infographic
In honor of those folks preparing for thanksgiving feasts in the US, I’d like to share the food prep timeline created by the writer at Ideas Illustrated. Enjoy consuming the results of all that...
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Do you know what you’re saying about grammar?
Do you offer grammar advice to others? I urge you to read 12 mistakes nearly everyone who writes about grammar makes to insure you’re not repeating common mistakes. Jonathon Owen, blogger at Arrant...
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Unexpected results of research on format and parallelism
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...
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Friday fun with the doge meme
Learn a little something about language humor at Much Reading. Wow. over at The American Scholar. Jessica Love explains the linguistic humor of the doge memes. Like the ones shown here. Happy Friday!...
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How to write like a (wo)man at work
Thanks to Linguistics Research Digest for pointing me toward a recent study showing that men and women use different writing styles (word choices and sentence structures). This is significant for a...
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Cut your email into three chunks for better digestion
Travis, a former student who now works as an IT consultant, asked for a summary of what we taught him about developing and organizing content in emails ’cause he wants to share it with his project...
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Why do we “deck” the halls?
As the holidays approach, I’m sharing a little linguistic trivia related to the traditional Christmas song, “Deck the Halls,” courtesy of Jessica Strasbaugh at Oxford Dictionaries. You might wonder,...
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Merry Christmas, y’all!
If this music doesn’t get you into the holiday spirit, nothing will! Watch (and listen to) the Blind Boys of Alabama sing “Go Tell it on the Mountain” with Stephen Colbert, which aired on The Colbert...
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The case for evidence-based plain language
Today I’m sharing a recording of “Plain by Design: Evidence-based Plain Language,” the talk given by Karen Schriver at PLAIN2013. PLAIN is one of the international organizations working to promote...
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3 lessons from great performers for workplace writers
Because documents are performances and great performers can teach us what it takes to deliver a great performance, I have used that theme to create a short (3:48) cartoon. My goal is to get people,...
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2013 in review at Pros Write
Thanks for visiting Pros Write! The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for the blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This...
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Friday fun with keister
In this episode of Mysteries of the Vernacular on TED-Ed, Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel try to trace the history of “keister.” Happy Friday!Filed under: Other Stuff Tagged: English Language Continue...
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What (else) do we know about writing white papers?
A couple of months ago, I summarized the available evidence on writing white papers. I’ve done more digging and want to provide a follow-up with a few more details on developing content, organizing it,...
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Do good students make bad workplace writers?
In my very first post (now the Pros Write About page), I stated how bizarre I find it that teachers who like to read literature are tasked with teaching young people how to write. I’m not the only one...
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Who is responsible for the quality of workplace writing?
I’m in the early phase of a research project designed to describe what influences writing quality in the workplace. Everyone has an opinion. And it usually focuses on blaming someone else. The public,...
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The genre of research articles: The literature review section
This post continues the series I’ve done over the past year or so on writing research articles (RAs) based on John Swale’s Create-A-Research-Space (CARS) model. See my first post for an overview of RAs...
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Vote in the People’s Choice Award for best plain English summary of a science...
Originally posted on simon denegri's lay review:I am delighted to announce that, as part of the Europe PubMed Central/British Library Access to Understanding competition, we are asking the public to...
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Do you question when to use a hyphen?
It’s hard for researchers to avoid lengthy noun phrases. Often those phrases are a jumble for readers to interpret without hyphens. I promised some guidance to the doctoral students in my seminar on...
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