Thank you for the presentation. Let me know if you have any other questions!

1. Tweet: #ClearWriting
We’ll be starting the webinar
at 3 minutes after the hour
Clear Writing
Simple steps to make your communication
clear
Sharon Burton
Sharon@sharonburton.com
Twitter: sharonburton
951-369-8590

2. Tweet: #ClearWriting
Clear Writing
Simple steps to make your communication
clear
Sharon Burton
Sharon@sharonburton.com
Twitter: sharonburton
951-369-8590

3. DCL Company Overview
▪ 30 years of experience providing electronic document
conversion services meeting the needs of
technology…today & in the future
• More than 1 billion pages converted to date
• Transform legacy & future documents
• US Based project management team
• Global capabilities
• Specialize in complex projects
• Employ a proven automated process

4. From Any Format to Any Format…
• Audio/video transcription
• Composition
• Consulting
• Content Reuse Analysis
• Digital Publishing
• Document & image conversion
• eBook production
• Project set-up/management
• Quality Assurance
• Translation services
• Workflow analysis

5. Serving a Broad Client Base…

6. …Spanning all Industries
▪ Publishers ▪ Heavy and Industrial
Equipment
▪ Government
▪ Financial Services
▪ Defense
▪ Manufacturing
▪ Life sciences
▪ Computing
▪ Automotive
▪ Semiconductors
▪ Aerospace
▪ Telecommunications
▪ Utilities

7. Webinar Mechanics
How does this thing work?

8. Tweet: #ClearWriting
Welcome!
▪ I’m Sharon Burton
▪ Content Consultant
▪ STC Associate Fellow
▪ Other stuff
▪ Been in the Tech Comm industry for 20 years
▪ Content Strategy Consultant - I help you make
your content work better
▪ Also teach:
▪ Technical Communication to Engineering students at the University
of California, Riverside
▪ Tech Comm certificate program at UCR Extension
▪ Business Writing for University of Redlands
▪ Custom training programs for clients

9. Tweet: #ClearWriting
How this webinar works
▪ You are muted
▪ If you’re talking, hoping we’d notice, we can’t hear you
▪ We’re recording this webinar
▪ None of your information appears in the final webinar
▪ The recording link is provided to you automatically in a follow up
email tomorrow
▪ A short survey is also included
▪ Helps us make the webinars better for you
▪ We should be done by the top of the hour
▪ I know you have a busy day

10. Tweet: #ClearWriting
Supporting role today…
▪ DCL is supporting us today
▪ If you have questions, they will help you in the questions window
▪ Let’s say “Thank you” to Data Conversion Labs for
hosting this webinar

11. Tweet: #ClearWriting
Audience and
communicating

12. Tweet: #ClearWriting
Communication
▪ From Wikipedia:
Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful
information. Communication requires a sender, a message,
and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not
be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate
at the time of communication; thus communication can
occur across vast distances in time and space.
Communication requires that the communicating parties
share an area of communicative commonality. The
communication process is complete once the receiver has
understood the message of the sender.

13. Tweet: #ClearWriting
What does this mean?
▪ Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful
information.
▪ This means that what we need to convey has to be
meaningful
▪ To the point
▪ Clear to our audience
▪ No extra noise

14. Tweet: #ClearWriting
What does it require?
Communication requires a sender, a message, and an
intended recipient…
▪ We are busy people communicating with other busy
people
▪ Our written communications convey the message for us
▪ Provides a record of our communication
▪ But also think about videos, podcasts, etc.

15. Tweet: #ClearWriting
People want communication
in the way they prefer
What does this mean?

16. Learning styles
▪ One of the most important things we can know about our
readers is their learning styles
▪ This tells us how to design the communication we deliver
▪ 4 adult learning styles
▪ Visual
▪ Auditory
▪ Read/write
▪ Kinesthetic (hands on)
▪ Most people have a strong preference 2 or more
▪ Some people are only one
▪ Some rare people are all 4

17. Visual Learners
▪ Pictures and line drawings
▪ Show concepts in graphics
▪ Flow charts are great
▪ Tables are also graphics
▪ A well designed page is also a graphic
▪ Color is important

18. Kinesthetic Learners
▪ Hands on stuff
▪ “Do” instructions
▪ Written words should be very descriptive
▪ Textures, moving things, other “feel” things
▪ Drawings and photos can work but they have to show
doing or texture or…

19. Read/Writer Learners
▪ More words are better
▪ Lots of written text, following the writing guidelines
▪ More about the writing guidelines in a few moments

20. Auditory Learners
▪ Sound is good
▪ Podcasts and webinars and other voice over
▪ Write in a conversational tone
▪ As tho someone is talking
▪ Written content not the best
▪ They read the instructions aloud to provide that auditory aspect
for themselves

21. Adult learning styles
▪ While people can learn in all 4 modes, people
have preferences for learning
▪ There are no “wrong” learning styles
▪ Just as there are no “wrong” eye colors
▪ People are much happier getting information in
the mode they are comfortable with
▪ People are busy. Why give them information in a mode
that they typically don’t like?

22. Learning preferences and jobs
▪ Learning preferences also attract people to specific jobs
▪ Visual kinesthetics might be hair dressers, interior
designers, architects, photographers
▪ Read/write auditorys might be song writers, actors, journalists
▪ Engineers are typically visual kinesthetics

23. A secret about learning styles
▪ Now that you know a little about learning
styles, here’s a secret
▪ You will always want to deliver material that matches
your specific learning style(s)
▪ This may not meet the needs of your readers but you
won’t know why
▪ This may also result in terrible communication issues
▪ They may have different learning styles than you or the users

24. Clear Writing Guidelines
How to communicate clearly

25. What’s in a sentence?
▪ Sentences include:
▪ Subject
▪ Verb
▪ Other stuff
▪ Subject
▪ Actor of the sentence
▪ Bob
▪ Verb
▪ Action of the sentence, performed by the subject
▪ Runs
▪ Predicate and other stuff
▪ Tells what the actor did or where the action happened or many other things
▪ To the car

26. Active voice
▪ Active voice is critical to engaging writing
▪ Active voice depends on the subject, the actor
▪ The actor comes first
▪ Passive voice:
▪ The award was won by the writers.
▪ Active voice
▪ The writers won the award.
▪ Always write active voice
▪ Practice with sentences that start “You can…”

27. Present tense
▪ English has 7 or 8 ▪ Only use (simple) past
tenses or (simple) future
▪ Other languages have tense when it really
more or less happens then
▪ We care most about ▪ Past tense
present tense ▪ Bob ran to the car.
▪ It puts the action in the
sentence in the now, ▪ Future tense
making is relevant and ▪ Bob will run to the car.
immediate
▪ Present tense
▪ Bob runs to the car.

28. Second person
▪ He, she, it, they, we, I, you
▪ You is second person
▪ You’re writing to a specific person
▪ Don’t use “the user”
▪ Unless there is really a different group of users, separate from
your reader
▪ Second person is also easier to read in English
▪ More familiar and trusted

29. Reader focused, reader centric
▪ Because we write to people, we need to keep the focus on
the reader
▪ Readers need to care why they need to know this information
▪ They want to know what they can do or why this is important to
them
▪ For example:
▪ WidgetBlue uses tags to talk to other products.
▪ You can use tags to let WidgetBlue talk to other products.

30. Short is good
▪ Short sentences are easier to understand
▪ Fewer ideas in a short sentence
▪ No more than 25 words per sentence
▪ Short paragraphs
▪ Paragraphs are groups of related sentences
▪ No more than 3 to 5 sentences per paragraph
▪ Short sections
▪ Sections are groups of related paragraphs
▪ No more than 3 to 5 paragraphs before a section heading

31. Headings
▪ Use headings to break the narrative text into chunks
▪ Headings visually break up the page
▪ Makes it easier for the reader to find the information s/he is
looking for.
▪ It also makes the information look easy to understand.
▪ Things that look easy to understand are easier to understand.
▪ Headings show the relationships between ideas or the
parts of ideas
▪ Critical in overview sections where you are introducing the user
to new concepts

32. Building sentences and paragraphs
▪ Paragraphs start with a topic sentence
▪ Topic sentences explain the point of the paragraph.
▪ The reader can read just the topic sentence and get the idea of
the entire paragraph
▪ Other sentences in the paragraph amplify and support
the topic sentence
▪ The paragraph can include
▪ an example that illustrates the concept
▪ with a limitation or special case the reader should know now that
they know about the general class

33. Example
▪ Another challenge is that business writing
follows very specific formulas in structure.
Think about your resume, for example.
Your writing style, the points you highlight
about your career or education, and the
look and feel play an important role. A
company uses all of these to decide
whether to offer you a job.

34. Parsing the paragraph example
Another challenge is that business writing follows very
specific formulas in structure.
▪ This is the topic sentence
▪ Contains the point to the paragraph
▪ It’s a short sentence
▪ 12 words
▪ Easy to understand
▪ Short words

35. Parsing example, cont
Think about your resume, for example.
▪ This is an example
▪ Using you helps you picture your resume
▪ Not some generic resume
▪ Notice how you have a picture in your head right away
▪ You can relate

36. Parsing example, cont
Your writing style, the points you highlight about your
career or education, and the look and feel play an
important role.
▪ Now that we have an example, we pull out important
features to think about
▪ We created a picture in our readers head
▪ It’s 21 words.
▪ Look how long that looks.

37. Parsing example, cont
A company uses all of these to decide whether to offer you
a job.
▪ We bring all the ideas to a conclusion
▪ In this case, it’s the point of the resume: to get hired
▪ No sentence is longer than 25 words.
▪ We have four sentences total

38. In sum
Think about these concepts for video scripts,
and other communication

39. To sum up
▪ Cover all 4 learning styles
▪ To learn more and find out your learning styles
▪ www.vark-learn.com
▪ Easy and fast. No wrong answers and select all that apply
▪ Tight writing
▪ 25 words or less per sentence, 3 to 5 sentences per
paragraph, headings every 3 to 5 paragraphs
▪ Active voice, present tense, second person
▪ Reader focused – Why does your reader care about this
information?

40. You will get a link to the recording tomorrow
I’ll upload the slides to SlideShare later today.
Questions?
sharon@sharonburton.com
Twitter: sharonburton
951-369-8590
www.sharonburton.com