Entries in Business writing (4)
10 Tips for Effective E-mail
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.
Roy Jacobsen
in Business writing, e-mail
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Bah, Humbug! Business Jargon Needn't Be a Done Deal
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.
Roy Jacobsen
in Business writing, Plain Language
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Scholar Champions Clearer Legal Writing
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.
Roy Jacobsen
in Business writing, Usage, Law, Plain Language
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Delivering Bad News
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.
Roy Jacobsen
in Business writing
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