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“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
While attributed to 17th-century mathematician Blaise Pascal1, this bit of wisdom has appeared in the writing of other notables over the years, as I was fascinated to learn. Here are just a few examples: John Locke wrote: “But to confess the Truth, I am now too lazy, or too busy to make it shorter.”2While the…
Leadership and Writing
I can’t remember ever seeing “good writing” in any list of top skills for leaders. While most leadership experts cite communication as critical, writing, which requires a knowledge base and skill set very different from verbal communication, often gets little press. That’s unfortunate because leaders write every day. Here are a few examples of how…
Revisiting Safire’s Fumblerules of Grammar
In a famous instance of crowd-sourcing long before the advent of social media, Pulitzer-winning speechwriter and New York Times columnist William Safire sought “perverse rules” of grammar from his readers. What that effort produced was perhaps the wittiest list of grammar rules ever, each featuring the error it aims to correct. The list was published…
Consolidate sentences to eliminate annoying repetition
Stringing sentences together that largely repeat the same information is a writing issue I often see with scientific and technical professionals, and it hampers readability. Sometimes this tendency creeps in because the writer is focused on being precise, or overuses the technique of making a general statement before a specific one. Or it happens because…
Divide complex content into smaller chunks
When sharing information about complex topics, or presenting detailed data, the best writers know that even subject-savvy readers can get lost or overwhelmed. Our brains need help processing the deluge of concepts, statistics, and jargon that fly off the page as if being discharged from a confetti cannon. One of the simplest, and best, ways…
Keep your reader reading
You can’t be an effective writer if you don’t keep your reader interested enough to keep reading once they’ve dived in. A great way to do this is to create suspense at the end of paragraphs by using the “cliffhanger” technique. As I was reading Ryan Cross’s article for Chemical & Engineering News on the…
Two writing tips scientists should use in 2019
Here is the text of a guest post published on 2/24/20 at blog.springboardsconsulting.com: Few things are as intimidating for those starting in corporate America as writing reports, especially when you are coming from the outside. Whether you are new to the country, industry or workforce, this is a difficult process. When I started a research…