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The video tutorial on bottom line placement
Core. Essence. Kernel. Heart. Crux. When applied to a document, these terms refer to its bottom line message. One of the things pro writers do is make the bottom line clear. That means they state...
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Amateurs suffer from directile dysfunction
The prevalence of directile dysfunction in men is well established, at least by women in North America. (I’m talking about the inability to ask for directions when traveling in unfamiliar locations.)...
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The video tutorial on transitions
No time to write much here until I finish some tasks related to my day job. So I’ll get right to it. Today’s brief video tutorial focuses on how to use transitions to guide workplace readers through a...
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Amateurs think paragraphs are for babies
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...
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The video tutorial on paragraph unity
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...
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Amateurs need explicit knowledge — not platitudes
I shared my position on the use of short lectures in a writing class a couple of days ago. But I told only part of the story from the video lecture-tutorial + teaching note that will be published in...
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Pros plan message organization strategically
This post follows up on a couple of earlier ones about a letter soliciting sponsorships for an outdoor sign at The First Tee of Tuscaloosa. Pros don’t settle for platitudes about audience described the...
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A lesson on the bottom line
The AACSB peer review team left this morning after a whirlwind onsite accreditation visit to our business school. I shared a copy of our report with you a couple of months ago. Today I want to share a...
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What is plain language? (Part One: Elements of the text)
One of the comments to How Do Your Sell Plain Language to Your Manager? insisted that a software program called StyleWriter is the key to management support for more successful writing in the...
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Pros avoid sexist language
Within Western culture, there are few workplaces with ONLY men or ONLY women. In theory, our workplaces are gender neutral. Our language, however, sometimes perpetuates a world in which women are...
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Want satisfied workplace readers? Give them an efficient reading experience
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...
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Use The Rule of Thirds To Help Your PowerPoint
Reblogged from make a powerful point: "Ripe. Oaky. Spicy." They're the kind of words that were used to describe white wine in a famous French experiment. That's odd, because they're the kind of words...
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What do your format choices mean to readers?
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...
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When should you delay stating your bottom line message?
Rarely. That’s how often you should delay when writing to readers from Western cultures. Our attention span is short. We value efficiency. We want to know your bottom line first. Then we’ll decide...
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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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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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Improve your reader’s efficiency — and win their gratitude — with bottom line...
I’m reorganizing some materials published earlier on Pros Write. And I’m starting with bottom line placement because no guidance for writing successfully at work is more important. If you want to win...
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Manage what your readers think you mean with effective paragraphs
Paragraph construction affects whether — and how fast — readers get a writer’s intended meaning. But getting the visual units (white space surrounding lines of text) to match the semantic units (what...
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Use parallel structure in lists to increase reading efficiency
Those offering advice to professionals who write have long suggested that similar ideas should appear in similar (or parallel) form. In fact, the advice appears in one of the earliest business writing...
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Think long-term and be kind to readers with well-formatted documents
It’s something of a paradox. But the space you leave blank in your documents matters. Compare these two forms discussed in an article about the importance of white space by the Nielsen Norman Group....
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