Avoid drowning readers in alphabet soup
Acronyms appear to speed communication. After all, if you can boil a multisyllabic pileup of words down into a handful of letters, that moves information faster, right?… Read the full article
Writing workshops, communication consulting and writing services
Acronyms appear to speed communication. After all, if you can boil a multisyllabic pileup of words down into a handful of letters, that moves information faster, right?… Read the full article
Beware adverbs, counsels The Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark.
Too often, they dilute the meaning of the verb or repeat it: “The building was completely destroyed.”… Read the full article
Why cut adjectives and adverbs from your copy?
Because modifiers:
Writing media relations pieces?… Read the full article
When “king of usability” Jakob Neilsen cut the fluff from a web page about Nebraska, the neutral web page was 27% more useful.… Read the full article
Turns out a Southwestern Tex-Mex salad by any other name would not taste as good.
Vivid menu descriptions — “applewood-smoked bacon,” “Maytag blue cheese” and “buttery plump pasta,” for instance — can increase restaurant sales up to 27 percent, according to research by Brian Wansink.… Read the full article
When I was customizing an in-house writing workshop for a utility company, I wanted to see whether there was a better way to define kilowatt hour, or kWh, for consumers.… Read the full article
Seattle investigator J.P. Beaumont, a character in J.A. Jance’s Partner in Crime, tells this story:
How do you make technical, medical and bureaucratic terms clear? Winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award demonstrate their techniques:
So you think your subject is complex? Try taking on the topic of nanotechnology.
That’s the subject of “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics,” a classic speech by Richard Feynman, one of the most influential American physicists of the 20th century.… Read the full article
As I was conducting one-on-one writing coaching with a client recently, I noticed that he’d used the term “onboarding” without defining it in a press release for trade publications.… Read the full article