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Author Archives: Norm Friedman
Framing Your Message, Part 2
Last week, we looked at the prime location for workplace writers to frame their messages: the subject line of an email. For most of us, email is the most frequent medium of written communication, and the subject line box is sitting … Continue reading
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Framing Your Email Message
Skillful writers do their readers, and themselves, a favor by effectively framing their messages. They let their readers know at the outset precisely where they are going. Whether the message is an email, letter, proposal, news release, or PowerPoint, effective … Continue reading
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An Embarrassment of Glitches II
Once again, I have come across an online article containing a treasure trove of common writing problems. See what you spot in this paragraph. A lot of the time, an employee who has recently been promoted to a supervisor role … Continue reading
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You’ve Got Style
One of many ways to refine our writing is developing a personal style guide. Some employers have a style guide to help ensure consistency and correctness across all departments, but most don’t. That shouldn’t stop you, however, from maintaining … Continue reading
High-Crime Area
In recent posts we’ve been identifying “alarms” we can set on commonly confused words, poorly understood punctuation rules, and other potential stumbling blocks. Today let’s look at a place in our writing that often contains errors: the title line. Because … Continue reading
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Alarm #3: Re-verberations
Reverberations are loud echoes, and a key to catching unwanted echoes in our writing is setting alarms on common traps so the lack of economy comes through loud and clear. Redundancies like “ATM machine” and “Please RSVP” are well known, … Continue reading
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“Fraternal Twins”
How many errors do you spot in these two sentences? 1. In his remarks at the all-staff meeting, our CEO inferred that a new vacation policy would go into effect in July 2015. 2. Based on my neighbor’s description of … Continue reading
Making Sentence Parts Fit
Steel yourself. We’re going to revisit a fuzzy topic from English class: the “dangling modifier.” Oh, yeah. Now what was that all about? The principle – simpler than you might think – is merely that we need to correct any … Continue reading
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Alarm #2: It’s About Time
Last week’s post introduced the notion of setting an alarm on words and phrases that can lull us into making an error or failing to write concisely. To continue the theme, here are a few sentences that each need an … Continue reading
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Alarm #1: The Lonely “Only”
I often emphasize a particular metaphor in my writing workshops for employee groups: that if we’re at all accomplished in any area – whether it’s writing or rappelling or retrofitting – we surely have a highly developed “alarm system” that … Continue reading
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