Posted in: writing tips

We recently had a question from a participant in our online course, "Technical Writing." As you may know. participants in all of our online courses receive feedback on their writing, and I'd shown her how to combine sentences to better illustrate the relationship between two sentences. She works in the financial industry which, as we all know, produces some difficult to read and understand documents (at...
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So many people claim that they hate writing — even authors and professional writers. Why? What is it about putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard that suddenly makes cleaning out the refrigerator or talking to an irritating coworker seem so appealing? Everyone knows that starting is the hardest part, but does it really have to be that difficult? And why do so many of us feel this way about writing? It’s...
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First, let's distinguish between editing and proofreading--they are not synonymous! Editing is the process of reviewing for content, logic, and other high-level elements, while proofreading is reviewing for misspelled and misused words, mechanical errors, and punctuation mistakes. Editing and proofreading are, in fact, two distinct processes that should not be conducted simultaneously. As we all know,...
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Too many writers (and non-writers) we've worked with over the years fail to use appropriate or effective topic sentences. As you may recall from seventh grade grammar, a topic sentence tells readers what to expect from a paragraph. While the topic sentence doesn't have to be the first sentence in a paragraph, many readers expect it to be and take that first sentence as their "cue" in terms of what the...
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