Morris Vaughan, Author at Words by a Pro

Policy and Procedure Documents Without Tears

Morris Vaughan — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 20:43:32 +0000

If you are a professional writer in a corporate setting, and are extremely unlucky, you may be called upon to write policy and procedure (P&P) documents. This is actually a good thing, for the company if not for you. Many P&P documents are written either by lawyers, in which case they are completely incomprehensible, or […]

The post Policy and Procedure Documents Without Tears appeared first on Words by a Pro.

The Flavours of English

Morris Vaughan — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 21:25:28 +0000

In the 1964 movie My Fair Lady, excruciatingly British phonetics professor Henry Higgins worries about the fate of the English language. “In America,” he observes, “they haven’t used it for years.” If you write or edit English prose for hire, you may be called upon to ensure a piece follows the spelling, grammar, and punctuation […]

The post The Flavours of English appeared first on Words by a Pro.

Citation Needed: Why Your Writing Depends on Citing Your Sources

Morris Vaughan — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 20:47:13 +0000

Journalists, academics, and Wikipedia contributors have widely varying abilities to put together coherent sentences, but they all know this: Unless it’s a firsthand account, something stated as a fact, without a source to back it up, is merely an opinion. Of course, there are many ways to cite sources, and there is a time and […]

The post Citation Needed: Why Your Writing Depends on Citing Your Sources appeared first on Words by a Pro.

Is Sentence Length a True Indicator of Readability?

Morris Vaughan — Tue, 23 May 2017 21:03:33 +0000

Have you ever been reading something and reached the end of a sentence, then had to start reading the sentence again because you forgot what it was about? Do you think it was simply because it was a long sentence? Or were there other reasons? We are often told that short sentences are more readable […]

The post Is Sentence Length a True Indicator of Readability? appeared first on Words by a Pro.

Numbers Racket: Incorporating Numbers and Math in Your Writing

Morris Vaughan — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 21:52:17 +0000

If you’re like most professional writers, you avoid any math more complicated than balancing your checkbook. You might not even do that anymore, since you can just check your bank balance on your phone. A math-free life—how great is that? In some cases, however, you may incorporate numbers or mathematics into your writing—in scientific or […]

The post Numbers Racket: Incorporating Numbers and Math in Your Writing appeared first on Words by a Pro.

Breaking All Some of the Rules

Morris Vaughan — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 17:24:15 +0000

The grammar police nabbed me recently. A client whose academic paper I was editing objected to one of my corrections. He pointed out that in a sentence where the subject is in the form “Not only…but also,” the verb must agree with the noun in the “but also” part. Example: “Not only language ninjas but […]

The post Breaking ~~All~~ Some of the Rules appeared first on Words by a Pro.

Just the Facts: Technical Material for a Nontechnical Audience

Morris Vaughan — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 20:24:52 +0000

There is almost nothing as metaphorically, if not physically, painful as watching two people who don’t know what they’re talking about try to explain something to each other. It’s as if the two come away from the encounter with less collective knowledge than they started with. Writing can be like that, sometimes: You have to […]

The post Just the Facts: Technical Material for a Nontechnical Audience appeared first on Words by a Pro.

Humor Me: When to Use (and Avoid) Humor in Your Writing

Morris Vaughan — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 18:35:23 +0000

It’s fairly safe to say that no one knows how to write humor. The great modern humor essayists – Dave Barry, P. J. O’Rourke, and the late Lewis Grizzard and Erma Bombeck, among many others –do it naturally, instinctively knowing just what turn of phrase and clever irony readers will find funny, but they probably […]

The post Humor Me: When to Use (and Avoid) Humor in Your Writing appeared first on Words by a Pro.

Why Mobile is Igniting the Software Tech Writing World

Morris Vaughan — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 02:15:52 +0000

There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when technical writing as a profession held a comfortable, well-established place in the development of products and software. At least, among mature organizations who understood the value that a technical writer brings to the process. Particularly in the software industry, technical writers could count on a fairly […]

The post Why Mobile is Igniting the Software Tech Writing World appeared first on Words by a Pro.

Don’t Be a Freakin’ Idiom

Morris Vaughan — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 22:08:21 +0000

Upon receiving my edits on an academic paper recently, the author—a non-native English speaker—questioned why I had changed “for reason of” to “for reasons of,” when there was only one reason cited in that sentence. It was a reasonable question for which I didn’t have a good answer, except that “for reasons of” is much […]

The post Don’t Be a Freakin’ Idiom appeared first on Words by a Pro.