Posted in: technical writing

Posted January 28, 2020 “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” So said famed author and management consultant Peter Drucker. To this statement, we might add a corollary: what you measure, you improve. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) related to writing can help individual writers and organizations as a whole improve the overall quality of their written materials. Monitoring...
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Posted November 12, 2019 Revisions, editing, and review are critical to producing successful written documents, but the process can easily turn wasteful, unhelpful, and unproductive. An effective review process requires a careful balancing act that recognizes the importance of editing (separate from writing) without inflating the process into a bloated mess. So, how can organizations make their reviewing and editing...
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Posted Sept. 3, 2019 Unclear writing is the bane of any reader. That’s especially true for technical writing, whose subject matter can cause confusion, setbacks, and other difficulties for readers if the material is not conveyed clearly. Imagine a technical report on which executives will base major decisions, but then those leaders walk away with the wrong understanding because the points weren’t clear....
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Posted July 2, 2019 Purpose-driven writing is more powerful than that which has no clear objective. That said, there's more to purpose than most writers realize. It's not enough to throw out a superficial reason for writing the piece with no further consideration. We’ve discussed this principle before, in our article "Goal-driven writing: ensure that everything you write gets results." There,...
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Posted Feb. 19, 2019 Far too many communications try to do far too much: cover too many subjects, go into too much depth, include too much information. It's usually an earnest and well-intentioned attempt to be comprehensive or thorough, but it ends up leaving the audience overwhelmed, confused, and uncertain. It's better to keep communications as sharply focused as possible. But how do you do that? Here are...
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