Government Guidelines for Concise and Clear Writing
Brian Curran sends me this article in Government Executive called “8 Tips to Improve Your (And Your Agency’s) Writing”.
This guidance comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, who recently developed a Writing Style Guide. You can download this 114-page PDF here.
After those 8 tips, the author provides this Pop Quiz.
Pop Quiz: Which ending would you pick for this post?
A. It is felt that, in order to utilize proper writing style, agency employees at this point in time should endeavor to utilize a great number of these suggestions which are above for the purpose of improving their writing capabilities.
B. Use these guidelines to improve your writing.
[Both links fail because of syntax errors. The “8 Tips…” link above yields a 404 error because of spurious “http://” syntax at the end. The PDF link is missing a colon.]
Those who most need such advice won’t read it. This is era when we are told, “leverage enterprise-wide, collaborative, team-building partnerships as a synergistic paradigm for stakeholder decision-support initiatives in a Weather Ready Nation.”
Both links have been fixed, Roger. Thanks!
Here’s to “synergistic paradigms”! :-/