If you are to communicate effectively, you must use writing that has good readability. To put that another way, if people cannot understand what you write, then your writing has failed. At the time of writing (August 2011), the Australian Federal Government has just sent a pamphlet to all Australians. Called ‘What a carbon price [...]
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I’ve written previously about structuring documents around Key arguments and Proofs (see here), but on a more general basis, how do you mount arguments that are persuasive and effective?
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Many emails you write in government or business are ‘action emails’ – those where you are asking someone you supervise to perform a task or tasks. Said like that it sounds quite straightforward but in fact many of the people I train have problems with this type of email. What sort of problems then?
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In my government writing training sessions I often discuss passages of writing with the group. For example, I’ll put up a PowerPoint slide that displays a piece of writing, and then we’ll analyse it. The ensuing discussion can incorporate many points that relate to good writing – aspects like sentence length, avoiding redundancies, using clear [...]
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….or how to write Minutes and respond to Selection Criteria! Very often in formal business and government writing it’s required that you present an argument. For example, if you are recommending a course of action, it’s important that you mount a strong argument in support of that outcome. If you are addressing Selection Criteria in [...]
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A lot of trainers in writing will tell you the following. “The reader’s interest is highest at the beginning of the sentence and drops away as they keep reading.” (This idea is shown by the red arrow in this diagram.) “Therefore,” they go on, “you should always place the most important point first in the [...]
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One area of writing for government that is often done poorly is the preparation of media releases. In fact, many media releases are written and published with little thought as to the potential damage that they are causing. Damage? Well, if you are effectively reducing the credibility of your organisation, it can only be called ‘damage’, [...]
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Many people writing in government and business never use first person pronouns – words like ‘you’ and ‘we’. So instead of writing “We will contact you within two weeks” the writer types “The department will contact you within two weeks”. So what’s the problem with that? I’ll tell you in a moment.
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Good writing has flow. And the more complex the concepts that you are trying to communicate, the better the flow needs to be. But what is ‘flow’ – and how can it be achieved? The good news is that a few simple steps can give your writing much improved flow, allowing readers to more easily [...]
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Many people believe that if the ideas are complex, so too must be the writing used to describe these ideas. But that is simply not true. Others believe that the mark of a good writer is one who uses long words and difficult sentence construction. But that, also, is not true. Instead, a good writer [...]
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