With not too much effort, you can find a template to tell you how to do almost anything: write a business letter, construct a thesis, churn out a pulp novel. This is one kind of scaffolding that you can use for greater or lesser effect in the art of writing, but there's an even more important one that kicks in before you even start your outline, and that's the metastructure of critical thinking. Critical thinking...
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In our classes, we always discuss reader-centered writing; that is,
writing that fully considers readers and what they want and need and how
they're going to use the document. Another element of this is "noise."
"Noise" can be categorized as the distractions readers face when reading.
Some of these, of course, are caused by the writer and some are the result
of noisy offices,...
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Why oh why do some writers seem to intentionally want to muddle meaning and make reading and understanding that much more difficult for readers? It's astounding to me that some writers intentionally use words that obfuscate (how's that for a word??) meaning. Essentially, they use "pompous" language, or to put it simply, big words that aren't necessary. Using pompous language is a pet peeve of mine,...
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Effective technical, business, and scientific writing all depend on the writer having excellent critical thinking skills. While the definition of critical thinking skills differs depending on who's doing the defining, a panel of experts defined them as "process of purposeful self-regulatory judgment that drives problem-solving and decision-making" ( Facione and American Philosophical Association,...
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