Check out the Campaign for Plain English’s site and especially:
Also, check out Jakob Neilsen’s articles about writing for the web. In particular:
If you work with websites or user interfaces, pretty much anything Nielsen has to say is worth reading.
There are some useful articles on this site too:
- How to write great case studies
- Being human is overrated (but not when you are writing)
- Bad reader, naughty reader
- Economist style and business writing
- Geeks: how to write for a non-technical audience
- Seven types of bad writing
And as a special treat for lovers of bad marketing language and daft naming conventions, please read this short piece from the New Yorker: The Privileged Few. It made me laugh until I cried.
Related posts:
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for posting this. How to Write in plain English is very helpful.
Great to see an article that sticks to showing the direct importance of good content – particularly useful is the information from Nielson on how people use the internet. It’s very helpful to see statistics proving that by doing something as easy as writing clearly and concisely, it is possible to increase usability to such a high degree.
Very useful post, thank you for sharing the PDF.
Checked the links as well the PDF and they are all very useful. Thanks a lot!
Thanks for stopping by – I’m glad you find Bad Language useful!
I’m on a bit of a mission to help people write better.
Brilliant list, so well written and loved the “Being human is overrated” post, keep up the good work
Thank you so much for this post. I found it really useful. I love the look of your blog btw!
{ 1 trackback }