Education has shifted from strong roots in grammar to allowing students to be more creative, leading to generations of students not understanding the fine points of grammar. One of the main points of this chapter is that writing says a lot about you and the company you may work for and can determine your income. Since moving to visual media and technology, the emphasis on the written word has decreased, which is now creating a demand for good writers within business and government industries. Caring about your grammar is the first step in showing you care about your business practice. Good writing guarantees that customers will be able to trust in your business; therefore, you will turn a profit and ensure some financial stability. The second main point of this chapter is that there are no shortcuts to achieving good writing. As we know, computers come with spelling and grammar check software, but this aid shouldn’t be the end all be all before submitting a document or sending an email. Oftentimes spell check will suggest a different spelling of a word which then makes the sentence grammatically incorrect.
This is the correct post for Journal 2… I accidentally posted journal 1 twice.
The main point of this chapter was to highlight the differences between academic writing and business communication. Business writing is not as complex as academic writing. Academic writing often includes long, complex sentences and doesn’t use contractions. Academic writing also closely follows MLA and APA formatting. Business writing is more relaxed and usually contains simple sentences that quickly get the point across. These two types of writing also look different on the page. Business writing, again, is simple and to the point compared to academic writing, which typically includes long sentences broken up with colons. The second point of this chapter was understanding plain language. Plain language is simple, more efficient, and practical, leading to a more efficient understanding of the message. Examples of plain language are often found within government correspondence and businesses such as insurance companies. Plain language is effective if the reader only needs to read it once to comprehend it. If it is read more than that, it is still too complex. According to the government’s site, plain language has cut time in half for users to solve a problem, fewer follow-up calls are reported, and compliance with the government is more than twice as high thanks to plain language. To conclude, plain language is more concise and readable. Academic writing is more complex than business writing, but having all three kinds in your toolkit is essential.
In the first chapter of Business and Professional Writing, MacRae clarifies the difference between academic writing (what most of us are most familiar with) and business writing. He explains them as being for different audiences, and the complexity with which you would write an academic essay, is not how you want to write your business report, memo, etc. As he says, “time is money!” and your boss, fellow colleague, or customer, is not going to want to spend time deciphering your business report. He follows up by saying, “The meaning of professional writing should be immediately clear.” This is his first main point, His second main point is all about the specific language of business writing. MacRae informs us that plain English is the language many governments and businesses are moving towards in the modern age. Plain English uses concrete and specific examples, avoids unfamiliar words, avoids wordy expressions and repetitiveness, all of which means to make the text as easy to read as possible. He explains plain language as being more efficient, effective, and universally understood.
One of the main themes of this idea of academic vs. business writing. These styles convey different ideas while still being relatively clear depending on the subject. Business writing is seen as very loose and the language tends to be flexible yet professional. While academic writing tends to be more open-ended and the author never refers to themselves for the most part. There tends to be an award almost when we finish reading academic knowledge. While business writing sets a goal. The second point of this article is the idea and importance of “Plain Language.” Plain language is important because it sets the global tone for how most conversations can occur through and around the grapevine. The idea is to make things easier for people to understand and process communication easier. However, business language can be used to confuse the consumer as well as give an example of an insurance company’s voice. To some, they might not understand but for most, they can somewhat decipher what the heck they’re trying to say sometimes. They also mention that plain language can be more concise as well as more digestible to people. It seems that plain language as well as academic and business writing has pros and cons on all sides. But understanding those sides are valuable to explore and understand.
One main idea that is discussed in this chapter is the difference between good academic writing and good professional writing. I found that good professional writing is similar to good scientific writing/reporting in that it is simple and concise, and made to be easily read and understood. Good professional writing is made for a broader audience and is important to understand because people important to your career and life will be reading and analyzing it. You must understand your audience.
Another main idea from this text is the importance of using and writing in “Plain English.” It is emphasized how important using plain English in professional writing can be, especially in a government or business setting. Making sure everyone who may read your documents will be able to easily understand it can save a company or government group time, money, and resources, as well as gain a better reputation with clients and customers. Writing in plain English makes the professional world easier for everyone.
After reading this section of the book, I have determined the two major points to be that in business writing, you should make it easy to understand and more relaxed than academic writing. Throughout our time as writers in school, we have been taught to make things sound really complex and challenging, given the challenging material of which we are writing about. This; however, is not the case in business writing. This chapter talks about how business writing is supposed to be easy to understand. This means taking out the complex words and specifics that are essential to academic writing. It also discusses how business writing is more relaxed. This means that we are allowed to use first, second, and third person rather than strictly using third. Making business writing easy to read and comprehend allows there to be less room for confusion amongst the interactions between the business and the consumer. It also allows for less miscommunication across all areas of the business setting. This structure makes a lot of sense when you break it down, but in the beginning I was slightly caught off guard, as it was always my understanding to sound as mature as possible when writing in a professional manner, this included making the writing sound more complex. Knowing that this is now not the case, allows for me to further understand and grow my writing skills to aid in more professional interactions.
In chapter one Academic and business writing styles are explained and compared. From my understanding Academic writing is meant to be more complex and formal wear as in professional writing it is more important to get your point across quickly and precisely. A key reason why they are so different is because they have different audiences. A quote that stood out to me was “time is money! The meaning of professional writing should be immediately clear, unlike academic writing, which is sometimes obscure.” Professional writing is meant to be as easy to read and understand as possible which makes sense why waste time with abstract ideas and big words when you could get straight to the point. The remainder of the chapter goes into detail about plain language and gives examples of how to turn text into plain language. I found this interesting because plain language is something I have never learned about in school before. While reading and learning about plain language I noticed that this book is written in plain language and maybe that’s why it has been much easier and enjoyable for me to read so far. So many things are overcomplicated when they don’t need to be because of how they are communicated. This section in the chapter tells us how many businesses and governments around the world are moving to put their communications into plain language i think this is an excellent idea and something that needs to be prioritized this will be beneficial because “ It is more, efficient, more effective, and leads to better public relations.Less time is needed to find and understand the information, less time is needed to deal who did not understand the information, and fewer errors are made.” An example that they gave that blew my mind was That 52% of people were unable to complete their passport form properly and then when it was rewritten in plain english 97% of applicants were able to fill it out correctly saving 370,000 hours of administration time per year. That’s shocking and just goes to show that we are making our lives way more complicated than they need to be.
Traditional academic and other forms of complicated writing are falling out of style due to their lack of communication. Their biggest problem is that it makes it hard for the general public to understand what is being published, which could negatively affect them. These documents can include laws, wills, and company policies. All of this information could be important for the average layperson to understand. But, the current writing standard prioritizes understanding only by the expert and no one else. It also makes it easier to understand. It makes it quicker to understand, thus not wasting people’s time on other tasks. This style of writing is known as plain writing. Plain writing not only includes language but format and look of documents. Less crowded documents with more graphics can make something easier to understand, conveying less information in more time. Guidelines of plain writing can make it so fewer words are present, meaning more people are likely to read and understand it. It has been shown to receive “fewer calls from customers, fewer errors by customers, and have higher rates of compliance to newer policies (McRae 29). The rule of thumb is that if something needs to be read more than once, it can be written more simply.
As discussed in the chapter on plain language, one of the big points focused on deciphering the style and intent of academic versus business writing. From this, the discussion on specialized writing tended to align with written works in academic fields where knowledge of specific jargon, background knowledge, and format tends to be structured based on particular disciplines. Whereas business writing gears toward generalist strategies where “This audience calls for a less specialized vocabulary and less complex set of concepts”(27). Additionally, professional writing can feel more stylized in visual matters like images, lists, and graphics to make the information easier to present (26).
Leading from this, the second essential point is the concept of plain language or plain English. Unlike the lesser-known jargon in fields like law, plain language emphasizes “concrete and specific examples rather than abstractions to be as clear as possible” (27). Again, the idea of creating effective and efficient communication based on serving a wide range of prospective audiences comes back to learning, sometimes relearning, the formats, tools, and techniques to offer clarity. In that same line, it is helpful to maintain the perspective of business and career writing where revenue and spending are taken into account; the easier it is to convey the purpose of written works, the success often follows when misunderstandings, complaints, and costs are reduced due to plain English writing.
First off, what caught my eye most about this chapter was what the author considered to be good elements of both academic and non-academic writing. For academic writing, what was listed felt more like common knowledge because I have participated in academic writing for about my entire high school/college experience. Therefore, what was more important to me out of these two sections was what is expected of professional writing. Although I have had a glimpse of what the professional world seems to be, this section has prepared me more in what is expected of me. It begins with how ideas must be communicated clearly and simply as possible, paragraphs are short, and specialized language (in most cases) is avoided rather than encouraged. This was something that almost set me back a little bit compared to what is expected of academic writing. If anything, it feels as if it is the exact opposite. In academic writing we tend to want to include complex language and in-depth contextual writing to support our ideas. In the professional world, this goes out the window. I believe that this can complicate ones ability to write in the professional world without doing the preliminary work and research to prepare for such. The section continues on to provide answers as to why they are so distinctly different because they require different audiences. In the professional world, one does not have time to read complex and in-depth writing surrounding a subject; it need to be concise. This is drastically different from the academic world where one does have and requires the time to devote to such reading and writing.
Another concept in this chapter that was interesting to me was the importance around usage of plain language or known as plain English. The importance of this is to decrease possibly misunderstandings and misinterpretations of more complicated texts. That despite it being a “professional” setting, the more simple the language the better. It has been surprising to me because we are required to learn such complex usage of written and spoken language in academic settings; so that one may assume it is necessary for the professional world. The features of plain English one must know to succeed in doing so are concepts such as using concrete examples, avoiding word heavy expressions, and repeating words/sentences/subjects. Doing so allows ones language to be conveyed clearly and effectively, relating back to how one becomes a good communicator.
Through chapter one of Business and Professional Writing by Paul MacRae, there is a big emphasis on the several differences between writing in a business setting vs. an academic one. The chapter also included helpful examples placed side-by-side, comparing two versions of the same text to show the differences between professional and academic writing. To start of with MacRae’s first point, it was made transparent that in order to become a successful writer in a business setting, “you may have to unlearn some of the techniques that might have made you a good academic writer.” This is an important idea, because it goes to show that a person can’t rely primarily on the skills needed to be successful in the academic world, and that it is important to understand the two types of writing. The next point was when MacRae dove into the defining differences. One key comparison being the use of plain vs. complex language with the former belonging to professional writing and the latter being academic. The purpose of plain language is for simplification, making the text easy to understand, whereas in academic writing, complex language is used to display the writer’s knowledge. What makes this distinction between the two writing styles so valuable, is the ability to communicate well with one’s target audience, and knowing how to ensure writing is properly received. This is a valuable tool that is needed for success.
Right off the bat the first thing that stuck out to me was in the beginning when it addressed the difference between academic and business writing. In academics, rules are stricter, language is stronger, information is more complex while business writing is more of the opposite. Looking at these explanations of each was interesting, especially the point that these writing styles are different because they have different audiences. Which is true, academic audience is usually a professor while a business audience, depending on what the writing is, could be anyone. Another thing that kind of correlates with the first concept I pointed out is plain language. This is something seemingly so simple that helps the government receive less customer complaints, less time problem solving and fewer errors made by customers. All of these things are pretty solid accomplishments. The whole goal of plain language is to make text, in business settings such as advertisements, as easy to read as possible. Plain language uses white space to make documents more readable, uses headings and well-labeled graphics and uses lists or tables when needed. I’ve never thought to pay too much attention to these kinds of details but hearing about it all makes sense and I found it very interesting.
The main focus of this section is to emphasize the difference between plain english and academic writing. While both are used in professional settings, academic writing is largely considered less accessible than plain english. Because of this it’s used in academic journals, studies, and in situations where the technical jargon is a required part of the piece. Some of the main differences between these writing styles is that in professional writing (in conjunction with plain english) allows the use of conjunctions, focuses on short and concise paragraphs, and allows the use “I”, “me”, “you”, etc. The distinction between these writing styles is important because in avoiding academic writing in our day to day we avoid misunderstandings and errors caused by specialized and oftentimes hard to understand language. Plain english focuses on easy to read writing because it needs to be accessible to the everyday person who might be reading (an example being a letter from an insurance company, the statement is worthless and is likely to cause misunderstandings if the recipient of the letter doesn’t understand the specialized language used in insurance settings).
13 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 2”
Education has shifted from strong roots in grammar to allowing students to be more creative, leading to generations of students not understanding the fine points of grammar. One of the main points of this chapter is that writing says a lot about you and the company you may work for and can determine your income. Since moving to visual media and technology, the emphasis on the written word has decreased, which is now creating a demand for good writers within business and government industries. Caring about your grammar is the first step in showing you care about your business practice. Good writing guarantees that customers will be able to trust in your business; therefore, you will turn a profit and ensure some financial stability. The second main point of this chapter is that there are no shortcuts to achieving good writing. As we know, computers come with spelling and grammar check software, but this aid shouldn’t be the end all be all before submitting a document or sending an email. Oftentimes spell check will suggest a different spelling of a word which then makes the sentence grammatically incorrect.
This is the correct post for Journal 2… I accidentally posted journal 1 twice.
The main point of this chapter was to highlight the differences between academic writing and business communication. Business writing is not as complex as academic writing. Academic writing often includes long, complex sentences and doesn’t use contractions. Academic writing also closely follows MLA and APA formatting. Business writing is more relaxed and usually contains simple sentences that quickly get the point across. These two types of writing also look different on the page. Business writing, again, is simple and to the point compared to academic writing, which typically includes long sentences broken up with colons. The second point of this chapter was understanding plain language. Plain language is simple, more efficient, and practical, leading to a more efficient understanding of the message. Examples of plain language are often found within government correspondence and businesses such as insurance companies. Plain language is effective if the reader only needs to read it once to comprehend it. If it is read more than that, it is still too complex. According to the government’s site, plain language has cut time in half for users to solve a problem, fewer follow-up calls are reported, and compliance with the government is more than twice as high thanks to plain language. To conclude, plain language is more concise and readable. Academic writing is more complex than business writing, but having all three kinds in your toolkit is essential.
In the first chapter of Business and Professional Writing, MacRae clarifies the difference between academic writing (what most of us are most familiar with) and business writing. He explains them as being for different audiences, and the complexity with which you would write an academic essay, is not how you want to write your business report, memo, etc. As he says, “time is money!” and your boss, fellow colleague, or customer, is not going to want to spend time deciphering your business report. He follows up by saying, “The meaning of professional writing should be immediately clear.” This is his first main point, His second main point is all about the specific language of business writing. MacRae informs us that plain English is the language many governments and businesses are moving towards in the modern age. Plain English uses concrete and specific examples, avoids unfamiliar words, avoids wordy expressions and repetitiveness, all of which means to make the text as easy to read as possible. He explains plain language as being more efficient, effective, and universally understood.
One of the main themes of this idea of academic vs. business writing. These styles convey different ideas while still being relatively clear depending on the subject. Business writing is seen as very loose and the language tends to be flexible yet professional. While academic writing tends to be more open-ended and the author never refers to themselves for the most part. There tends to be an award almost when we finish reading academic knowledge. While business writing sets a goal. The second point of this article is the idea and importance of “Plain Language.” Plain language is important because it sets the global tone for how most conversations can occur through and around the grapevine. The idea is to make things easier for people to understand and process communication easier. However, business language can be used to confuse the consumer as well as give an example of an insurance company’s voice. To some, they might not understand but for most, they can somewhat decipher what the heck they’re trying to say sometimes. They also mention that plain language can be more concise as well as more digestible to people. It seems that plain language as well as academic and business writing has pros and cons on all sides. But understanding those sides are valuable to explore and understand.
One main idea that is discussed in this chapter is the difference between good academic writing and good professional writing. I found that good professional writing is similar to good scientific writing/reporting in that it is simple and concise, and made to be easily read and understood. Good professional writing is made for a broader audience and is important to understand because people important to your career and life will be reading and analyzing it. You must understand your audience.
Another main idea from this text is the importance of using and writing in “Plain English.” It is emphasized how important using plain English in professional writing can be, especially in a government or business setting. Making sure everyone who may read your documents will be able to easily understand it can save a company or government group time, money, and resources, as well as gain a better reputation with clients and customers. Writing in plain English makes the professional world easier for everyone.
After reading this section of the book, I have determined the two major points to be that in business writing, you should make it easy to understand and more relaxed than academic writing. Throughout our time as writers in school, we have been taught to make things sound really complex and challenging, given the challenging material of which we are writing about. This; however, is not the case in business writing. This chapter talks about how business writing is supposed to be easy to understand. This means taking out the complex words and specifics that are essential to academic writing. It also discusses how business writing is more relaxed. This means that we are allowed to use first, second, and third person rather than strictly using third. Making business writing easy to read and comprehend allows there to be less room for confusion amongst the interactions between the business and the consumer. It also allows for less miscommunication across all areas of the business setting. This structure makes a lot of sense when you break it down, but in the beginning I was slightly caught off guard, as it was always my understanding to sound as mature as possible when writing in a professional manner, this included making the writing sound more complex. Knowing that this is now not the case, allows for me to further understand and grow my writing skills to aid in more professional interactions.
Journal #2:
In chapter one Academic and business writing styles are explained and compared. From my understanding Academic writing is meant to be more complex and formal wear as in professional writing it is more important to get your point across quickly and precisely. A key reason why they are so different is because they have different audiences. A quote that stood out to me was “time is money! The meaning of professional writing should be immediately clear, unlike academic writing, which is sometimes obscure.” Professional writing is meant to be as easy to read and understand as possible which makes sense why waste time with abstract ideas and big words when you could get straight to the point. The remainder of the chapter goes into detail about plain language and gives examples of how to turn text into plain language. I found this interesting because plain language is something I have never learned about in school before. While reading and learning about plain language I noticed that this book is written in plain language and maybe that’s why it has been much easier and enjoyable for me to read so far. So many things are overcomplicated when they don’t need to be because of how they are communicated. This section in the chapter tells us how many businesses and governments around the world are moving to put their communications into plain language i think this is an excellent idea and something that needs to be prioritized this will be beneficial because “ It is more, efficient, more effective, and leads to better public relations.Less time is needed to find and understand the information, less time is needed to deal who did not understand the information, and fewer errors are made.” An example that they gave that blew my mind was That 52% of people were unable to complete their passport form properly and then when it was rewritten in plain english 97% of applicants were able to fill it out correctly saving 370,000 hours of administration time per year. That’s shocking and just goes to show that we are making our lives way more complicated than they need to be.
Traditional academic and other forms of complicated writing are falling out of style due to their lack of communication. Their biggest problem is that it makes it hard for the general public to understand what is being published, which could negatively affect them. These documents can include laws, wills, and company policies. All of this information could be important for the average layperson to understand. But, the current writing standard prioritizes understanding only by the expert and no one else. It also makes it easier to understand. It makes it quicker to understand, thus not wasting people’s time on other tasks. This style of writing is known as plain writing. Plain writing not only includes language but format and look of documents. Less crowded documents with more graphics can make something easier to understand, conveying less information in more time. Guidelines of plain writing can make it so fewer words are present, meaning more people are likely to read and understand it. It has been shown to receive “fewer calls from customers, fewer errors by customers, and have higher rates of compliance to newer policies (McRae 29). The rule of thumb is that if something needs to be read more than once, it can be written more simply.
As discussed in the chapter on plain language, one of the big points focused on deciphering the style and intent of academic versus business writing. From this, the discussion on specialized writing tended to align with written works in academic fields where knowledge of specific jargon, background knowledge, and format tends to be structured based on particular disciplines. Whereas business writing gears toward generalist strategies where “This audience calls for a less specialized vocabulary and less complex set of concepts”(27). Additionally, professional writing can feel more stylized in visual matters like images, lists, and graphics to make the information easier to present (26).
Leading from this, the second essential point is the concept of plain language or plain English. Unlike the lesser-known jargon in fields like law, plain language emphasizes “concrete and specific examples rather than abstractions to be as clear as possible” (27). Again, the idea of creating effective and efficient communication based on serving a wide range of prospective audiences comes back to learning, sometimes relearning, the formats, tools, and techniques to offer clarity. In that same line, it is helpful to maintain the perspective of business and career writing where revenue and spending are taken into account; the easier it is to convey the purpose of written works, the success often follows when misunderstandings, complaints, and costs are reduced due to plain English writing.
First off, what caught my eye most about this chapter was what the author considered to be good elements of both academic and non-academic writing. For academic writing, what was listed felt more like common knowledge because I have participated in academic writing for about my entire high school/college experience. Therefore, what was more important to me out of these two sections was what is expected of professional writing. Although I have had a glimpse of what the professional world seems to be, this section has prepared me more in what is expected of me. It begins with how ideas must be communicated clearly and simply as possible, paragraphs are short, and specialized language (in most cases) is avoided rather than encouraged. This was something that almost set me back a little bit compared to what is expected of academic writing. If anything, it feels as if it is the exact opposite. In academic writing we tend to want to include complex language and in-depth contextual writing to support our ideas. In the professional world, this goes out the window. I believe that this can complicate ones ability to write in the professional world without doing the preliminary work and research to prepare for such. The section continues on to provide answers as to why they are so distinctly different because they require different audiences. In the professional world, one does not have time to read complex and in-depth writing surrounding a subject; it need to be concise. This is drastically different from the academic world where one does have and requires the time to devote to such reading and writing.
Another concept in this chapter that was interesting to me was the importance around usage of plain language or known as plain English. The importance of this is to decrease possibly misunderstandings and misinterpretations of more complicated texts. That despite it being a “professional” setting, the more simple the language the better. It has been surprising to me because we are required to learn such complex usage of written and spoken language in academic settings; so that one may assume it is necessary for the professional world. The features of plain English one must know to succeed in doing so are concepts such as using concrete examples, avoiding word heavy expressions, and repeating words/sentences/subjects. Doing so allows ones language to be conveyed clearly and effectively, relating back to how one becomes a good communicator.
Through chapter one of Business and Professional Writing by Paul MacRae, there is a big emphasis on the several differences between writing in a business setting vs. an academic one. The chapter also included helpful examples placed side-by-side, comparing two versions of the same text to show the differences between professional and academic writing. To start of with MacRae’s first point, it was made transparent that in order to become a successful writer in a business setting, “you may have to unlearn some of the techniques that might have made you a good academic writer.” This is an important idea, because it goes to show that a person can’t rely primarily on the skills needed to be successful in the academic world, and that it is important to understand the two types of writing. The next point was when MacRae dove into the defining differences. One key comparison being the use of plain vs. complex language with the former belonging to professional writing and the latter being academic. The purpose of plain language is for simplification, making the text easy to understand, whereas in academic writing, complex language is used to display the writer’s knowledge. What makes this distinction between the two writing styles so valuable, is the ability to communicate well with one’s target audience, and knowing how to ensure writing is properly received. This is a valuable tool that is needed for success.
Right off the bat the first thing that stuck out to me was in the beginning when it addressed the difference between academic and business writing. In academics, rules are stricter, language is stronger, information is more complex while business writing is more of the opposite. Looking at these explanations of each was interesting, especially the point that these writing styles are different because they have different audiences. Which is true, academic audience is usually a professor while a business audience, depending on what the writing is, could be anyone. Another thing that kind of correlates with the first concept I pointed out is plain language. This is something seemingly so simple that helps the government receive less customer complaints, less time problem solving and fewer errors made by customers. All of these things are pretty solid accomplishments. The whole goal of plain language is to make text, in business settings such as advertisements, as easy to read as possible. Plain language uses white space to make documents more readable, uses headings and well-labeled graphics and uses lists or tables when needed. I’ve never thought to pay too much attention to these kinds of details but hearing about it all makes sense and I found it very interesting.
The main focus of this section is to emphasize the difference between plain english and academic writing. While both are used in professional settings, academic writing is largely considered less accessible than plain english. Because of this it’s used in academic journals, studies, and in situations where the technical jargon is a required part of the piece. Some of the main differences between these writing styles is that in professional writing (in conjunction with plain english) allows the use of conjunctions, focuses on short and concise paragraphs, and allows the use “I”, “me”, “you”, etc. The distinction between these writing styles is important because in avoiding academic writing in our day to day we avoid misunderstandings and errors caused by specialized and oftentimes hard to understand language. Plain english focuses on easy to read writing because it needs to be accessible to the everyday person who might be reading (an example being a letter from an insurance company, the statement is worthless and is likely to cause misunderstandings if the recipient of the letter doesn’t understand the specialized language used in insurance settings).