[Spotlight Post] Remembering John Manning and Plain Language
Hello, Friday, you’re looking nice (if Holy Cow, COLD – for Texas). It’s seriously time to rethink the Friday Blog Posts – I’ve run out of steam for most of the spotlights. I still want to do a blog post on Friday, but I need to think about alternate topics and themes (and hopefully something other than memorials – though those are important, too).
Speaking of memorials, I do have to do one today. John Manning – a gamer, a fan, and a publisher – passed away this week. I knew him peripherally. I have friends who knew him more. He fought cancer, quit smoking, was on a list for a transplant of some sort – and finally succumbed to the illness. I didn’t get around to working with him as a publisher, but we talked about it. He was a genre fan of us all. Conventions will not be the same without him. To those who knew him well, my deepest sympathies.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately – not only fiction, but non-fiction for the Day Job. I ran across a resource while doing some training. It’s the Federal Plain Language Guidelines. And it’s actually really useful – yes, it’s dealing mostly with “Government-ese”, but it has some things that apply to any style of writing. It’s gives some really clear explanations (and examples)of how/why Active Voice is a good thing and what it looks like – I was told in college that I was “Wordy” but never really HOW to fix it – until I finally said, “What does that mean?”
This guide actually addresses that. It addresses how to write to your audience (one of the best lines I’ve ever seen – “Only write at an 8th grade level if you’re actually writing for 8th graders.”). I’m not all the way through it – I keep getting dragged away from it – but it’s got some really good tips for writing in general. It’s a free download in PDF or Word.
So, we’ll see how this blog section works itself out over time. It might just change to “TGIF” and be a “Rhonda Rambles About Stuff” type posting cycle.