Facttactic
Corporate and technical writers
In our work we spend a lot of time sending written documents back and forwards with our clients, and sometimes email just doesn’t cut it, especially if we want to send large documents or collaborate on writing.
Luckily there is a huge range of free, online tools to help make it easier to share information and collaborate online. Here’s a good list of some useful services [Read more…] about sharing’s caring — useful online document services
Simple, concise language, short sentences and plenty of sub-headings are key to making a website easy to read, according to all the research. But how can you tell if you’ve done a good job in writing your web content?
I’ve just come across this great tool to measure and rank the readability of your web content: The Readability Test tool.
I found it in this very useful article on best practice tips for improving web content. I recommend this article as a good start to anyone wondering how to tidy up their website.
And how did this site rank?! The tool said it should be easily understood by 15 to 16 year olds. Not quite our target market! … but we think we need to get it down even lower to around the 12-13 years age group. We want it to be quickly and very easily understood by very busy people.
Here’s a page of links to tons of high-quality papers and essays about how users read on the Web and how authors should write their web pages.
Ever struggled with how to best structure your writing? Here are some style guides that may be useful. Some are free online tools; some are available to purchase online.
(Dear readers, this list was updated in April 2014, June 2015, August 2017, April 2018, May 2021)
The contents of this page have been moved to the Facttactic technical writer website here.
A bit of light-hearted language nonsense here, but apparently the following is a real sentence!
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”
Mamihlapinatapai … well, I guess you already know it’s a word from the Yaghan language (Tierra del Fuego), but what does it mean?! It’s a … “look shared by two people, each wishing the other would initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.”
We won’t be squeezing it into a media release any time soon, but we like it and think it deserves its place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word” and its reputation as one of the hardest words to translate.
Facttactic’s core business is writing for other businesses. We spend a lot of time doing it — writing, that is — and a lot of time thinking about how to make it better and how to give our clients the best writing service they could get.
So … we always enjoy finding out what other accomplished writers have to say on the craft of writing. This Guardian article is a good read. It asks a bunch of established, British, fiction writers for tips on the dos and don’ts of writing.
While we don’t write fiction here at Facttactic, there’s a number of tips in the article we think are worth keeping in mind — Jeanette Winterson, for example: “Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom”, and Colm Tóibín: “Get on with it”. Consider it done!