What if you asked someone the following question and got the following answer?
QUESTION:
How did the agency find out if participants in the program modified their vehicles during the review period?
ANSWER
In order to make a determination as to whether or not program participants made modifications to their vehicles during the period of review, agency officials instituted requirements that a limited number of controls be implemented by agency inspectors.
Huh?
This “answer” is one example among many billion of bad writing.
What’s odd to me is that many readers would consider it fairly standard writing, especially for a government report. It sounds official and substantive, though I’m not 100% sure it makes any sense.
But considered as a verbal response to a question asked out loud, face to face with another human being, it sounds incredibly stupid. Who talks that way? (ANSWER: Nobody!)
To echo Friedrich Nietzche, L'écriture est morte! (Writing remains dead. And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves...? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become installation artists simply to appear worthy of it?)
One of the very top writing challenges my students, and participants in my writing seminars, express to me is their trouble “getting started.” This “how to” post will explain the ins and outs of writing that opening INTRODUCTION. It will cover three main recommendations:
give readers what they need at the start,
avoid starting with “background” info,
use the INTRO to set up the whole document.
In this connection economy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKXZgTzEyWY), nothing is more important than…connecting. So, when we write, we need our writing, above all, to connect with the reader. Here’s my “how to” for making sure your writing connects with your readers.
The idea that workplace writing needs to be more formal to be "professional" or "impressive" is a 19th-century zombie that just won't die.
Not everyone loves writing or finds it easy. As a student, I struggled with what our teacher called the “first draft.” I also struggled to turn that into a different “final draft.” But what is a first draft when it comes to workplace writing? [HINT: it happens before any drafting is done.]
…I keep getting consulting jobs because my interventions, according to feedback I’m given, do, in fact, improve writing within these organizations. But what really changes within an organization after my writing consulting sessions? Not just individual writing skills. In concert with these individual gains, what changes after my consulting is the whole office writing culture…
Wow…to me it’s quite unbelievable that GRAMMAR has been considered “the skunk in the garden” in the 21st-century writing classroom, and for decades before that. But I want to argue for GRAMMAR. I want to demystify it, show what it really is, and explain how it fits into a skills-based approach to teaching/learning writing…..
