Archive: Effective Writing
When Being Persuasive, Personalize Your Appeal for Best Results
You want to persuade your team members to provide ideas or feedback, so you write an email to one person, with everyone else’s name in the “cc” box. You get no response and wonder why your persuasive appeal failed. The problem is that when multiple...Making the Most of the Revising Phase
Avoid sitting in in front of the screen in anguish, reading and rereading the draft and hoping that it will rewrite itself. As you immerse yourself in the revising phase of the writing process, shaving words, repositioning information, and making other alterations,...Revising: the Essential Step in the Writing Process
Good writing is created in steps, and the most important one often is neglected because hurried writers want to make the first draft the final draft. The writing process involves organizing ideas, drafting, revising, and editing, and it is in the revising phase that...Clear Writing: Giving Readers Immediate Understanding
A sentence can be unclear for numerous reasons. Here are four common mistakes: Word choice – This could mean using technical language or trendy buzzwords, but many times writers use everyday words and still provide a blurry picture: a virtual knowledge transfer...Evolution of Words: One and One Can Make One
When you say pronounce some terms, they sound as if they are one word, and some are but others are not. Some are two words and some are two words with a hyphen, Why the variation? It is how words naturally evolve. The English language allows for what is called free...By Ken O’Quinn
Focus on Them
Perfect Phrases for Business Letters (McGraw-Hill)
TD at Work — Business Writing for Managers
As a contributing author in this book on leadership, Ken offers insights and tips for managing difficult conversations, providing effective feedback, and being authentic. Order here.
Perfect Phrases for Business Letters (McGraw-Hill)
Provides the right words and phrases for any situation - quickly. The book was reprinted in Japanese because of high-volume sales there.
TD at Work — Business Writing for Managers
The Association for Talent Development invited Ken to write this 22-page booklet for the TD at Work series.
Current Blog Post
Researchers: Reading Bite-Size Bits of Information Hinders Our Thinking
Historically, humans have developed the brain capacity for "deep reading," that is, processing information, relating it to our existing knowledge, …