While not everyone may have been aware of or effected by it, we recently had an outage of PerfectIt Cloud. Now, outages are the worst. You already know that. They mean you can’t access the service you paid for. And they often hit right before a deadline.

One of the most effective quality-control and disaster-prevention tools ever developed is also one of the simplest: the checklist. Surgeons use checklists. Astronauts use checklists. Stage managers use checklists. And editors use checklists.

In December 2022 we launched our Medical Plain Language Summary style. It’s launched in beta as a living document, and we hope that the medical writing community will continue giving us feedback so that we can keep making it more useful for medical communicators working with plain language summaries.

In December 2022 we launched our Medical Plain Language Summary style. It’s launched in beta as a living document, and we hope that the medical writing community will continue giving us feedback so that we can keep making it more useful for medical communicators working with plain language summaries.

Hyphenation can seem like the editor’s party trick. A party trick is something that few people know how to do, and while it’s not that important to most people, it’s always impressive to see someone pull it off. You know, like tying a cherry stem into a knot with your tongue.

Italics are like fancy dress for words. Seeing a word in italics is like going into your local grocery store and seeing someone working there in a samurai costume. “Well,” you think, “you’re certainly here to tell me something.”

Those of us writing business proposals can’t rely on a Hollywood ending. Bid documents require the art of persuasion. That’s more of a challenge for many of us than we would like it to be. So if you’re more concerned about huge grants than Hugh Grant, here are some things to watch out for when writing proposals, bids, and other pieces designed to sell your company to clients.

You’re taking the plunge: you’re setting up as a freelance editor. You’re going to have your own company and you’re going to get clients and edit their text and invoice them and make a good living as a midwife of words. But the first choice you face is a big one: What are you going to name your company?

If you read the title and just said “Don’t you mean Felix Ungar?” then you know you are. The very fact that you’re reading this makes it likely that you’re a Felix. You’re probably an editor, and editors tend to be Felixes (or should that be Felices?).

There are five important things to watch for in numbered and bulleted lists. If you’re editing according to a style manual such as The Chicago Manual of Style, you’ll have good guidance for many of these things. But even if your style is entirely at your discretion, you’ll still want to think before you list.

Here’s a quick test on when to use a and an. Spot the errors: I was at an historic occasion, a meeting at a hotel near an university to discuss an HUD directive, when my recorder ran out of power. For want of an AA battery, my records of the meeting were lost, and it was all consigned to no more than a * in an MS.

How many slip-ups do you count? There are actually six mistakes in there. Let’s see what they are—and why!

It’s important to get a PLS right. When done well, these summaries can improve health literacy in the general public and encourage the pharmaceutical companies that sponsor clinical research to operate more transparently. These eight hacks, adapted from tips by the Plain Language Association International and The Center for Plain Language, will help you master your next PLS.

Sometimes the best way I can help people is to explain exactly what’s happening. In the case of PerfectIt Cloud, I think it’s going to surprise you. But let’s start with the big news that I know you wanted to hear. The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt Has Feature Parity Across Versions.

Here are some ideas for what to do about 42 of the most hated buzzwords.

Before you schedule an interview with your SME, you’ll want to do a bit of homework first. Plopping down in front of them and saying “tell me everything you know” will waste both of your time—and likely won’t get you the focused content you need. Instead, take an organized approach to working with an SME. Here are six steps to guide you through the process.

Knowing your audience is critical in technical writing. If your content isn’t catered to the right audience, your readers may be turned off by your copy. They may not understand the critical information you’re trying to convey. And if you have to rewrite your copy? That’s a waste of time, resources, and effort. So how do you tailor content to specific audiences? Here’s a three-step process for learning about your audience and producing content specific to their needs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a spotlight on the World Health Organization (WHO), an intergovernmental organization that works worldwide to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable. As part of their work, WHO publishes a range of documents, from international health standards, to “situation reports” describing progress in fighting a disease, to advice for the public on staying safe and healthy.

The importance of good writing in technical grant proposals is significantly underestimated. Have a thought for the grant review committees. Reviewing 40 or 50 grant applications for three or four funding opportunities is depressing enough, but when they are written by scientists, engineers and tech people with few writing skills, it can be agony. Are you surprised that grant proposal reviewers respond better to well-written proposals?

Spellcheck is one of the most basic checks that editors and writers run on their documents. But those same editors and writers will tell you that spellcheck doesn’t always know what to do with complex or unusual terms like drug names.

Military writing is not just instruction manuals. It includes official correspondence, reports, academic writing projects, contracts, blog posts, press articles and many other genres. The U.S. Army alone lists over forty kinds of official army publications. As technical writers, we can learn a great deal from military style rules. But we also need to understand when and how to deviate from them, to have the right effect.