My book The Art of E-mail Writing is built on 21 maxims, one of them being “structure rules.” With a solid sense of structure, writers can communicate multiple items to diverse audiences and systematically convey the most complex issues to the least informed readers.
I was illustrating this point in a writing class by pointing to the strong organization of a participant’s writing sample. Another participant, Julie Wang, an underwriter from the Provident Bank, summarized the critique beautifully when she said, “Structure has no language.”
What a terrific thought! Good structure transcends language skills. Without first knowing the best order to convey the many ideas that reader needs to know, we’re just wasting our time trying to create good sentences, which may be meaningless to our purpose. Get the structure in order first, and then elaborate.
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A participant in one of my workshops, D. Hom, asked a question about hyphenating expressions such as “end of year.” Determining what to h...
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It's a good thing that the hyphen is not a frequently used punctuation mark because most people don't know how to use it. The hyp... -
READER QUESTION Which of the following sentences is correct? The contract was signed by Lee, Sam, and me . The contract was ...