A key challenge exists between management’s writing of internal controls and an auditor’s assessment of those controls. The challenge relates to the level of detail, and it was highlighted when I recently taught a class on writing policies, processes, and…
How Product Managers Lead Through Communication By Barry Mohn “Our product managers need to be the CEOs of their products.” This is what a senior director declared at a meeting I attended recently. We were there to discuss leadership…
Escalation. Urgent. Never. Inability. Unsound. Failure. The use of these words in email can put a writer precariously on the edge of a conveying negative, disrespectful tone. However, these words certainly don’t guarantee that your tone will fall off a cliff.…
Could the Challenger disaster have been averted with more persuasive writing on the part of Morton Thiokol engineers? The Rogers Commission report reveals there was test data showing the O-ring that failed in the launch was highly sensitive to cold.…
Happy New Year! Surely your number one resolution is to improve your business and technical writing skills, so in that vein I thought I’d send you some items to consider. These are six common problems that give business and technical…
And you thought the comment section below political articles got heated? You haven’t seen anything until you’ve read articles on grammar as I recently did in the online Harvard Business Review. An article with the prickly title of “I Won’t…
Miles Davis’s album, Kind of Blue, is regarded as one of the most influential jazz albums of all time. Its music offers lessons for musicians of all genres, and its techniques offer interesting parallels and lessons for presenters. Here…
After reviewing hundreds of writing samples from workshops in 2011, three writing basics stand out as necessary to make writing positive and clear. Test your daily writing for these: 1. Positive wording: Attitude, attitude, attitude. Doesn’t it make a big…
By Andrew Moore I recently had a chance to review your work and what I found shocked me. Of course, I don’t know you from Adam, but did I get your attention? Are you curious to know what shocked me?…
By Alison Rosen I'm one of those weirdos who actually enjoys public speaking, so I was surprised, early this summer, when the thought of giving a toast at my sister's wedding began to fill me with dread. It wasn't so…