Reading Room
Avoid the passive voice is orthodox advice – but it is silly, simplistic, and treacherous, no matter how many experts chant it. This essay, loaded with quirky examples, explains how the practical writer decides which voice to use. The issue isn’t as complicated as many people make it.
54k PDF
This is a short play, whose characters have an impossible time deciding whether to use "a or "an" in front of "historic" and "historical." The dialogue may strike you as absurd, but it’s close to what actually occurred in the summer of 1999.
20k PDF
Many tenacious beliefs about proper English usage and style are simply wrong – and the damage they cause is greater than most people realize. Half-truths and fallacies not only clutter our thinking and cost us time, but they also force us to contort the language, to say what we don’t truly mean, and to torment the reader with profoundly cockeyed phrasing. This essay examines 25 of the common false taboos.
150k PDF
This is the most "academic" of the essays here. It examines two transactional documents not in terms of clarity, but in terms of the writer’s decision-making ethics. It goes on to show that style itself – not content, but the expression of content – ultimately takes its shape from the writer’s ethics.
36k PDF
This article, published in a journal devoted to legal writing, argues that although legal writing does need serious reform, we should start by reforming the idiom of law, and leave the conventions of English alone.
20k PDF
In the spring of 2007, Oregon was considering whether to enact Plain Language legislation. I was asked to provide testimony addressing two issues: the cost of implementing Plain Language, and the fear that Plain Language might undermine legal validity. I include the text here because it might prove useful for other entities (corporations and agencies, as well as governments) who are concerned about these issues.
37k PDF
This is a meditation on a coffee mug that has an ambiguous message printed on the inside of the rim. I suppose it’s basically a complaint, hurled at the open-mouthed universe, that people just don’t care about the convention of direct address anymore.
66k PDF
This short, goofy encounter really happened, and it instantly struck me as a kind of fable. It makes the point that you can be a lot more efficient by telling your reader what something is than by telling him what it isn't.
7k PDF
This is Chapter One of The Devil's Stylebook, an eccentric work in progress. In it, Lucifer (the author) lists and explains dozens of handy rationalizations you can use to achieve the abominable kind of workplace writing he wants — in his words, "hellish style."
129k PDF
Lauchman Group
1324 Wild Oak
Rockville, MD 20852
Telephone 301-315-6040
Fax 301-838-9044
email richard@lauchmangroup.com
1324 Wild Oak
Rockville, MD 20852
Telephone 301-315-6040
Fax 301-838-9044
email richard@lauchmangroup.com
