Tag: writing

As a young boy, my favorite part of Kindergarten (after milk and naps) was “show and tell.” I truly loved standing up in front of the class and showing them something I’d found, learned, or otherwise enjoyed. As a writer, trainer, and instructional designer, I learned to “show don’t tell.” Then I learned the Kindergarten […]

The headings in your email or larger documents are probably more important to your readers than what you’re actually writing about. Fortunately, it’s easy to figure out both how to write genuinely useful headings and to know where to put them in your emails or documents. How you’ll use your time getting this right, though, depends […]

Writing clearly and effectively is difficult — in fact, there’s no chance that you’ll get it right the first time….which is why you get to rewrite. Rewriting isn’t about fixing your mistakes, rewriting is about adding excellence. Here’s a three-part plan for doing rewriting right.My buddy Mal Stiefel once said he was never at a loss for words […]

I kept noticing that I frequently make the error of doubling a word in what I write. When I write the source document in HTML or LaTeX, the line breaks are arbitrary. That means that the error may be obvious in the output, but not so obvious in the input. For example, the file I […]

Everybody wants their writing to be concise and clear. Here’s some simple rules that you can follow to achieve both clarity and concision in the next thing you write — and a warning about when being concise is a bad idea. When I ask participants in Learning Tree’s business writing course what matters to them in business […]