1. Forgetting the connection between quality and credibility.
• Quality in presentation reflects upon the material’s credibility. Examples – formal
report submitted on recycled paper (poor quality), proposals or documents with
misspellings, etc.
2. Treating email casually.
• Sign, proofread, do not use ALL CAPs, etc.
3. Misgauging your audience’s comprehension level.
• Understand your audience, non-engineers and non-scientists may not comprehend
your technical language. Different disciplines use different technical language.
4. Ignoring tone (which is established by the writer).
• Are the reader’s concerns more important than the writer’s concerns? Are you
projecting an attitude of solving the reader’s problems? Are you presenting the
information an easy to read and understand manner? Are you demonstrating
respect for the reader by providing a document that contains no errors of fact,
spelling, grammar, or punctuation?
5. Being mystified by parallel grammatical structure.
• Understand form (nouns, infinitives, etc.) and function (subject, predicate, direct
objects, etc.) – be clear and concise!
6. Flinging punctuation onto your page or screen.
• Colons separate a complete thought (independent clause) from a definition or list.
Commas are not to be used to join two independent clauses without a
coordinating conjunction. There are many, many, more examples.
7. Ignoring the “sales” element of your documents and presentations.
• Features and benefits should be clearly stated and easily recognizable.
8. Crowding your page or screen.
• Avoid single columns and long paragraphs. Slides should have small numbers of
bullets and use phrases, etc. Do not be afraid of using larger fonts and having
white space.
9. Using unsuitable illustrations.
• Poor fonts, inappropriate clip-art, inconsistent backgrounds, busy backgrounds.
10. Abusing Charts.
• Data-ink (“the non-erasable core of a graphic”) use only what is needed to convey
the measured quantities and remove redundant information. Reduce Chart-junk –
non-contributory visual information – clean, legible charts and legends.