“Writing with Style”
Economist Education
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An excerpt from the latest edition of The Economist’s style guide
“When readers give us their time, we want to make it worthwhile, and that means making every word count,” writes Lane Greene, The Economist’s language columnist and founder of Economist Education’s popular course on business writing and storytelling.
Mr Greene is behind a new edition of The Economist’s style guide, which is issued to all its journalists and, since the 1980s, available for the public to buy. Released in June this year by Profile Books, “Writing with Style” elucidates and explores the principles for producing informative, persuasive and entertaining prose. In doing so, it offers tools and techniques to help readers write simply, clearly and compellingly.
Both the guide and our business writing course examine pitfalls to avoid if you want to write well. One scourge of bad writing is professional jargon, which often simply serves to confuse readers. Here is an excerpt from the book, covering the ”use and abuse” of jargon and specialist terms.
Read the excerpt here.