Writing Clearly at Work
Effective workplace writing starts with conclusions, uses clear sentences, avoids jargon, and respects the audience's knowledge.
What was corrected
Article mischaracterized Deborah Tannen's real 1994 book (actually about gendered conversational style, not written-vs-spoken prosodic cues) and included an unverified specific empirical origin story for Barbara Minto's real Pyramid Principle (her actual insight concerned junior consultants' argument structure, not an executive reading-behavior study). It included an unverified statistics (48%, 2 million) for Josh Bernoff's real survey and misdated Rudolf Flesch's real book (1951, not 1952) while inventing client-response claims. It included an unverified entirely nonexistent SEC staff attorney ('Norm Brand') and a '40 percent' reading-time statistic. It included an unverified entire Boris Groysberg study of '500 executives' that does not exist in his real published work. It misapplied a citation to 'Richard Nordquist' (a grammar reference writer, not an original researcher) with an unverified Journal of Business Communication finding. It included an unverified specific finding attributed to Laszlo Bock's real book Work Rules! that could not be verified in the actual text. It unverified sample size and swapped findings for a real 2016 NACE survey (real: 201 employers, verbal communication ranked highest; article stated: 400 employers, written communication ranked highest). And it included an unverified entire Nitin Nohria Harvard Business Review article and a '40 hours of senior editor time' statistic with no findable source.
Both sections were rewritten to keep only the real, verifiable content: Tannen, Minto, Bernoff, and Flesch's real work described accurately without the unverified statistics and mischaracterizations; Orwell's fully accurate 1946 essay and quotes preserved; Amazon's real six-page memo culture, the real Plain Language federal initiative, P&G's real one-page memo standard, and the fully-accurate Theranos and Challenger/Tufte case studies preserved; the entirely unverified Groysberg, Nordquist, Google/Bock, NACE, and HBS/Nohria claims were removed rather than corrected, given that no real underlying finding could be located for any of them.
Why this is better
This was one of the most heavily unverified articles in this batch outside the two 100%-fabrication-rate cases - only 3 of 13 independently-checked claims were fully accurate, with fabrication spanning both mischaracterization of real sources and wholesale invention of studies, names, and statistics.
More by Selen Ikbal Uslu in Workplace Communication
- Correction Giving Feedback Effectively
- Correction Communication Clarity Checklist
- Correction The Benefits of Asynchronous Communication