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Showing posts with the label written communication

Criteria for "quality" from Bing/Yahoo!'s perspectives

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About a month ago, Searchenginejournal.com published this article on things that Bing have disclosed that they penalize web content for from a ranking perspective. Most of the points they made concerned concision, but the final point on actively discouraging machine-translated text caught my eye. I'd posted in the past about how translation did not equate to localization , so I was rather pleased to imagine that someone was incorporating grammar and spelling checks into the ranking algorithm. However, I also have the following questions: Do they verify that the language attribute found in the HTML matches the body text language that people read? If the language is a distinct flavour, such as English as spoken in India or the Kansai dialect of Japan, is that taken into account during the linguistic quality assessment? Do they penalize on slang, profanities or "text-speak" orthography, or will they process them accurately and take that into account in evaluating the

5 Writing tips, or a response to "8 Essential Tips to better Content Writing"

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Here's the original blog post upon which I'm commenting. (A disclaimer: I've had no interactions with this author save the message I left for him on his blog. I also have no metaphorical axe to grind nor malice with which I'm replying (the apt expression in Japanese would be that I'm not "selling him a fight"). It's simply that I wish to present my critique on the actual 8 listed tips. I certainly agree with his opening paragraph.) Now, my response proper: I believe his 8 tips could be condensed into 5. Moreover, in my world they would be re-ordered as the following: Valuable This merges his "valuable" and "solution" tips, and is related to "relevance" too, in terms of what the audience expects to find on the site, topic-wise. Credible  Using vetted sources for information is an essential part of all academic writing; lend credence to one's own assertions whenever possible online, too. This also touches

Reminiscences: software documentation

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I feel fortunate that I can't identify first-hand with Tina, the long-suffering tech writer in Dilbert. My desire to provide user and administrator manuals for software applications stem back to even before I entered the professional workforce. The motivations, however, didn't stem from any false hopes that there would be any significant audience for said work. As an undergraduate I eventually ended up majoring in a combination of Technical Communication and what they call Brain & Cognitive Science, which involved neuroscience, psychology and linguistics. I also worked at the university libraries, where I spent one summer cataloguing musical recordings by the various ensembles over several decades (mainly on vinyl). It was the following year, that their adoption of a system from OCLC (I believe it was Connexion, but I could be mistaken) led to an opportunity to create an administrators' concise guide. When later I arrived at a documentation role, I found that str

Tips on business email authoring

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It occurred to me that next year marks twenty years since I first began to use email. Since then I've registered and deactivated well over a dozen addresses. Now I have ten active ones, most of which filter and forward mails into two inboxes: one business, and one personal. If I become more adept at tapping - or Swyping - perhaps I'd want to use my smart phone for most personal communiqués. However, I think it will take considerable time before becoming comfortable using "text message orthography" in business contexts, including instant messaging. This is why I'm not even going to address the basics of formal writing rules such as capitalization, punctuation, and writing out words fully, in the following tips. Use the subject line effectively: differentiate and justify why you're sending the email by summarizing its primary topic clearly. I'd also recommend attempting to be concise at the same time, but it would be somewhat hypocritical of me to d

Where on-page SEO and essay writing practices coincide

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Casting my mind back to (well) over a decade ago, I still remember being taught some principles of short essay writing: The title should reflect the primary topic. As with well-formed markup language (HTML, XML), the opening and closing sentences should summarize the topic, assertion or opinion.  Each of the middle paragraphs should cover interrelated ideas that expound upon the main topic, and be ordered logically, building upon the prior paragraph. Boldface and italics can emphasize important points, though they should be used sparingly. In looking at Google's algorithm for keyword density and prominence factors, we see that they seem to expect these exact best practices in every web page in order to determine what the topic is for said page: The <title> and <h1> tags should contain the primary keyword - the prominence is also dependent upon overall length of the text strings, and the position in which it occurs. The keyword should occur in the first and closi