How to write about, say, spectroradiometers
How do you make technical, medical and bureaucratic terms clear? Winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award demonstrate their techniques:
And what if I told you there was another tool out there that reduced readership and made people stop reading sooner? Would you stop using it? How quickly would you get rid of it?
“During the Des Groseilliers expedition, he spent most of his time monitoring conditions on the floe using a device known as a spectroradiometer. Facing toward the sun, a spectroradiometer measures incident light, and facing toward earth it measures reflected light. If you divide the latter by the former, you get a quantity known as albedo. (The term comes from the Latin word for ‘whiteness.’)”
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Get the gobbledygook, jargon & gibberish out
Jargon. Buzzwords. Acronyms. They’re things that make your reader go, “Huh?” And we need to get them out of our message.
Indeed, jargon irritates your reader, makes your message less understandable, reduces your social media reach and influence, cuts your chances of media coverage, makes your website harder to find and demonstrates your lack of knowledge about the topic.
It may even suggest that your company is in trouble.
At Cut Through the Clutter — our two-day tight-writing master class on April 6-7 in Washington, D.C., and on Aug. 17-18 in San Francisco — you’ll learn how to avoid these obstacles by translating the language of your organization into the language of your readers.
Specifically, you’ll learn how to:
- Determine when to use jargon to streamline communication — and when to avoid it at all costs.
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- Turn Google into the best thesaurus ever.
- Define terms the reader-friendly way (Hint: It’s not the way we learned to do it in Journalism 101.)
- Steal techniques from Warren Buffett to make complex technical information easier to understand — and more fun to read.
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Happy Valentine’s Day to you!
Happy birthday to me!
I’ve always felt a special connection to Valentine’s Day, because my birthday is the day before. And, all I want for my birthday is to see you this month.
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And here’s what my lawyers told me to add: Offer good on new tickets only. Not combinable with any other offer.
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