Effective Writing

Bad technical writing. It screams at you from every proprietary page of a comprehensive, network-enabled, specialized technology and advanced application company’s website…

What?

Welcome to the land of techno-babble. Fraught with pitfalls, sinkholes and swamps, it is a land where heavy paragraphs drag you down; sentences trip you up; your eyes glaze over strange words; and service pages provide hazy “solutions.”

Sadly, many people get lost in this land and don’t know where to go or what to do. Give them what they really want and lead them out of confusion; tell them what you do in bold, powerful language that is simple and effective.

Above all else, good technical writing must be accessible. Visitors should leave your site as customers, with a clear understanding of what your product or service does and what it will do for them.

 

Find Resources at websites like Project Gutenberg and Bartelby’s.com.

Public Domain webisites like Project Gutenberg and Bartleby.com are gold mines if you’re looking for free literature or verse, style and grammar guides, and more.  They provide a plethora of work pre-1920’s, and its all free for you to devour at your pleasure.

Project Gutenberg offers 18,000 books online. These include everything from books by Ovid and Dante to Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and numerous other authors. They are an excellent resource, and all the books can be downloaded as e-books.

Bartleby.com is an open resource, Public Domain site that offers numerous writing and grammar resources, including the American Heritage Dictionary, Strunk & White,  Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and even Gray’s Anatomy. Their searches are divided into reference, verse, fiction, and non-fiction.

Improve your writing and editing skills and help other people in the process: write for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is user edited, meaning anyone under the sun can edit or change an article. While this results in some vandalism, Wikipedia is by nature self-correcting. It is an excellent place for both experienced and aspiring writers all over the world to do some community service and hone their craft.

Free information is integral to our progress as people, but there’s no reason it has to be bad. If you’re there and see a mistake, simply edit it and move on. And though you’re encouraged to sign up, you can also submit anonymously http://www.wikipedia.com/

Do the world a favor and edit once in awhile. It doesn’t cost you anything but a small piece of time. And it could win you something-check out Wikinews’ writing contest at the Wiki News Site.