Articles

10 Tips for Effective E-mail

2007-07-05T18:18:54Z

Since its inception as a tool used by a few computer users in the mid-60, e-mail has risen to be a dominant business communications medium. Surveys show that workers spend anywhere from 30 minutes to four hours a day writing, reading, and answering e-mail.

Follow these ten tips (plus one more for good measure) to help ensure that your messages do what you want them to do. Right-click here and choose Save As to download 10 tips for effective e-mail.pdf.

Bah, Humbug! Business Jargon Needn't Be a Done Deal

2007-05-22T12:03:45Z

Editor’s Note - I’m trying something different with this article: It’s a downloadable Adobe Acrobat file. It’s licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License, which means you are free to distribute copies of the work. (Click here for more information.)

The Bad News: Business writing is mostly painfully bad. The Good News: We can do something about it. Right-click here and choose Save As to download Business_Jargon.pdf.

The Persistence of the Subjunctive

2006-09-14T02:19:24Z

If it were a human being, you couldn’t help but pity the poor subjunctive mood. Few people know what it is, and of those who do, many are convinced that it is dying.

Well, if the subjunctive is dying, it is enjoying one of the longest death scenes in history. As early as 1851, grammarian Goold Brown opined, “It would, perhaps, be better to abolish the use of the subjunctive entirely. Its use is a continual source of dispute among grammarians, and of perplexity to scholars.” Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage cites other early authorities who were convinced that “the subjunctive, as a separate mode, is almost lost and out of mind in our language.” An 1896 grammar textbook proclaimed, “The subjunctive as a form of the verb is fading out of the language.”

Scholar Champions Clearer Legal Writing

2006-08-21T13:16:14Z

Legalese is ubiquitous. It’s the fine print on the back of credit card statements, the license agreements for software, the warranties (and warnings and disclaimers) for new products. It often requires a magnifying glass and is considered to be convoluted, impenetrable, jargon-laden writing that is reviled by hapless readers.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Joseph Kimble, a Thomas Cooley Law School professor and editor-in-chief of The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, as well as the author of Lifting the Fog of Legalese: Essays on Plain Language (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2006). Kimble spoke to the Eye about his advocacy of plain language writing.

Plain Language in the Federal Government

2006-07-07T21:28:32Z

Government communicators are public servants. So it’s a sad irony that their writing style has long been known as bureaucratese, “characterized by buried verbs, passive voice, overlong sentences, and loose grammar. Add to that an overlay of doublespeak and officialese, and you end up with bureaucratese at its finest” (from Garner’s Modern American Usage). No way of speaking and writing could be less suited to the putative goal of service to the public.

Fortunately, an intrepid band of public servants is determined to stamp out bureaucratese. Marching under the banner of plain language, these revolutionary word warriors have been fighting for regulations, forms, brochures, and letters that the majority of us can understand on a first reading.

Writers, Safeguard Those Precious Words

2006-06-29T03:11:06Z

Here’s a roundup of tools that can make your writing life a little less stressful.

What's the Deal with E-Books?

2006-06-29T02:52:45Z

When e-books (digital versions of printed books, read on computer screens, handheld devices like PDAs, or dedicated e-book readers) were first introduced in the late 1990s, boosters and industry pundits issued cheerful prognostications about their prospects. Publishers would embrace them because many of the costs of printing, storing, and distributing paper books would be eliminated. Consumers would adopt them because the latest bestseller by John Grisham could immediately be purchased, downloaded, and added to a compact library of e-titles small enough literally to slip into a pocket.

But those glowing predictions have never materialized. Is the e-book story a tragedy, or perhaps a farce? Or has the death of the e-book been announced too soon?

Defending Copyright on the Web

2006-06-28T18:46:05Z

Vanity googling: Many of us have done it, entering our own names in the Google search box to see what kind of tracks we’ve left on the Web. Sometimes the results are entertaining. I discovered that I have the same name as a well-known Norwegian author. (I’m sorry that I don’t understand any Norwegian besides “Tusind tak,” which means “a thousand thanks.”)

But some writers are unpleasantly surprised when they use a search engine to “find themselves.” They find that their content has been stolen. Publishing on the Internet has added a new dimension to the age-old problem of content theft.

Hopefully, Wistful No More

2006-06-28T18:18:11Z

As an introductory sentence modifier, hopefully is accepted by some as perfectly legitimate and vilified by others, such as Edward Johnson in the Handbook of Good English, as “sloppy vagueness.” I am talking about the use of hopefully to mean “it is to be hoped that,” as in this sentence: “Hopefully, you aren’t gnashing your teeth because of this sentence.”

Delivering Bad News

2006-02-25T22:27:39Z

On January 24, 2003, a team of NASA engineers held a briefing to warn about the potential hazard to the space shuttle of flying debris. They had found that foam insulation on the external fuel tank could cause catastrophic damage to the heat shield during a launch. Because the key points of their warning were obscured by jargon and buried in the final bullet point of a hard-to-read PowerPoint slide, the message never got through the NASA bureaucracy. One week later, the Columbia broke up on re-entry, killing all seven astronauts on board.

We may not be in a similar position, with lives depending on our messages. More often, we’ll be called on to draft a message to employees about impending layoffs, or a letter to stockholders about recent financial problems. Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news, but when the task falls to us, professional ethics demand that we not flinch from laying out the message as clearly as we can. Doing so takes honesty, sensitivity, and humanity.