Content, clearly.
As a plain-English editor, I spend a lot of time converting dense ‘bureaucratese’ into language that is clear, accurate and matched to the audience. One of the main tools in this trade is simple language: using short words in place of longer words and phrases.
So I was interested when my son recently came home from school with a list of words and their replacements.
Have you ever gone house hunting and noticed the effort that goes into styling the properties on the market? A splash of colour spills across a bed of plumped-up pillows. A well-designed artwork calls from a freshly painted wall. A recognisable wine bottle and 2 glasses rest on an outdoor tray. Not an object seems out of place.
Although there are many guides to writing, copyediting and proofreading, structural editing (or ‘edit1’) is harder to define and explain. At its heart, it is about the audience. The aim of an edit1 is to make sure the audience can quickly and easily grasp the information you are presenting; a logical, intuitive structure helps you to achieve that.
Making health content digital offers several advantages.
The transition to digital is especially interesting when it comes to health content. The traditional (historical) world of health professionals involved bulky textbooks, verbose journal articles and printed guidelines that could easily go out of date without the user even realising.
A friend recently joked that it was ironic that the ACT Writers Association couldn’t get the apostrophe right, when the National Farmers’ Federation could.
Is she right?
It turns out that some phrases and titles that look like they might need an apostrophe actually don’t.
Almost every website, brochure or poster has that familiar phrase at the end: ‘For further information …’.
But is more information necessarily better?
It may seem to be a poor business model, but at Biotext we sometimes find that we have better results when we don’t give clients what they want.
If you publish content for the web, chances are you’ve come across SEO – search engine optimisation.
Research into the readability of text tries to quantify how effective a piece of written language is in communicating a message to the audience and to understand what makes some texts more difficult than others.
The Australian manual of style (AMOS) is for anyone who writes, edits or presents information.
Developed in collaboration between Biotext and Macquarie University, AMOS provides practical and expert guidance to help you write, edit and present.