Writing Matters

Plain Language Writing Workshop - Six Strategies for Cleaning the Clutter From Your Writing: December 8, 2010

In honor of the Plain Writing Act of 2010, we are offering a practical, hands-on, half-day workshop on strategies for writing in plain language. Register now to join us for this workshop on December 8, 2010 in Silver Spring, Maryland. In this workshop, you'll learn how to use clear, accurate wording that will help your reader do what you ask and understand what you mean. Spend an afternoon brushing up your own writing skills and learn how to improve the documents you edit for others.

You will learn:

• How to tailor your writing to your readers' needs
• A two-tier process for editing for conciseness
• How to make your writing scannable
• How, and when, to display information in vertical lists or tables
• How to cut word count by 10 percent, 25 percent, or even 50 percent
• How, and why, to write in active voice

You should attend this workshop if you:

• Value clarity in written communication
• Need to improve your writing skills
• Want to be able to explain to colleagues why their writing needs to be edited
• Are interested in how the Plain Writing Act of 2010 will affect writing in the government and beyond

You will receive:

• A notebook containing course exercises and resources
• Before-and-after examples that show the power of a plain language rewrite
• A plain language resource list

Contact me at 301-989-9583 or [email protected] for more information or to learn about a tuition discount for enrolling three or more people from your organization.

-- Leslie O'Flahavan

We're So Over It: Rereading a Snarky 1997 Magazine Article About E-WRITE

While fulfilling my New Year's resolution to purge a filing cabinet jammed with papers, I came across a tattered photocopy of an article about E-WRITE that appeared in the "Fast Forward" feature in the February 1997 issue of Working Woman magazine. Our business was only about six months old at the time, and we were thrilled to be interviewed for the magazine. But we weren't thrilled when the article came out; we were stunned. What we thought would be a celebration of our forward-thinking woman-owned training business was, instead, a major mock-fest.

Apparently, the idea that we were charging four figures for a day-long e-mail writing course for 25 people seriously offended the author: "They get $2,000 for a day's worth of advice on how to tighten sentences and shorten paragraphs on-line." The piece portrayed us as snake oil saleswomen: "O'Flahavan and Rudick admit they have no technological expertise, but they sure know how to exploit the cyberboom." Not content to belittle us herself, the author recruited experts to corroborate that our business idea was merely opportunistic. She quoted Joanne Serling, an account manager at Wilson McHenry in New York, skeptically stating "If you can't write, you've got bigger problems than any e-mail course can fix" and Malcolm CasSelle, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who said "If you ride a fad, you can write your own price tag." (You can download the 1997 article, which I've retyped, so you don't have to squint at the image.)

Thirteen years later, this nasty article makes me smile with pride:

• We were right and Working Woman magazine was wrong. People do need, and do value, e-mail writing training. Our curriculum and our client list have grown. We're thriving, even in tough economic times.
• In 1997, we didn't even have business cards, but we did have clients. Only six months old, we were doing business with Lockheed Martin and Cable & Wireless. Not too shabby.
• The author compared us to "Mrs. Bunmaster, your tenth-grade English teacher." Well, in a former career I was a tenth-grade English teacher. I was honored to be compared to one in 1997 and I am today.
• The author used quotation marks around the word expertise, as in e-write's "expertise." Well, expertise grows with time. In 2010, our expertise is real; we're authors of a book on e-mail writing, and I'll be giving e-mail-related presentations at three national conferences during the first half of the year: Annual Call Center Exhibition, HDI 2010, and the  Government Customer Support Conference. No quotation marks needed.
• We shared page 16 of the magazine with Tony Bennett.

Do you have any interesting business artifacts from 1997 that you'd like to share? Sometimes, looking back is the best way to get ahead!

-- Leslie O'Flahavan

Writing for the Web: Show Authors How the Sausage is Made

In October and August, I had the pleasure of teaching a day-long Writing for the Web course for the National Association of Secondary School Principals (principals.org).  Sarah Lile, NASSP’s go-getter web editor, invited me to teach and managed the course logistics.  

I did my Writing for the Web thing for NASSP. I showed lots of relevant web examples, broke down the task of writing for online readers into essential skills, and gave participants hands-on web writing practice and feedback.  Both courses went great!  In fact, one participant commented “… [the class is] eye-opening and helps to clarify the time, effort, and ‘science’ necessary to have a great website.”

But Sarah did something that few of my clients do, and I think her 15 minutes of the course made all the difference.  Sarah did a short, focused presentation on the process of publishing web content at the principals.org site.  She showed course participants how the CMS works and what the content contribution screens look like in the CMS.  She explained how much hand-coding is involved in the publishing process and how those “pretty” documents the content authors were sending her, the ones loaded with MS Word’s crummy code, require hours of scrubbing before they look right online.  Most of the content authors had no idea about the steps required for their content to be published at the site, so Sarah’s presentation during the Writing for the Web course was an eye-opener with lots of long-lasting positive outcomes.  Content authors gained

•    More respect for the web team’s time
•    More reasonable expectations for how long it takes the web team to publish content
•    Understanding of how the CMS supports good online communication.  For example, the content authors saw the title and abstract fields in the CMS content contribution screen. They now realize that their content will need a good title and a short abstract.  They are motivated to write these elements themselves because they understand that Sarah and her team can’t be experts on everyone’s content.

So all you web content managers out there, let your content authors know how the sausage is made.  They can’t really participate properly unless they know how the process works. 

-- Leslie O'Flahavan