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Poor writing can be bad business Ashland workshop will show business folks how to improve By BILL VARBLE The write stuff WHAT : Writing Revealed, a business writing workshop WHEN : 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Tuesday WHERE : Ashland Hills Inn, Ashland WHAT ELSE : It's $275. To register, call 488-3641 or e-mail [email protected] ASHLAND -- Why is so much business writing downright bad? "We all took English," Susan DuMond says. "An unfortunate side effect is that we all think we can write." It's not that easy, of course. DuMond would like to disabuse people of the notion that writing is a skill that can be mastered without practice. As she says, you wouldn't expect to throw a curve ball unless somebody showed you how, right? DuMond and Judi Stratton, both of Northern Connections, an Ashland-based software technical writing service, plan a writing workshop for business people next week. DuMond says participants will dismantle sentences, fix them and build better ones while learning about the importance of active verbs, white space and re-writing. She says many people who don't do much writing are surprised at the time good writers spend re-writing and polishing. "You've barely begun, my friend," she tells students when they put sentences to paper. DuMond didn't set out to be a writer. She studied acting at Bennington College in Vermont and earned a doctorate in educational policy at the University of Oregon. She did free-lance writing while she was working on her doctoral dissertation "I loved it," she says. She began full-time free-lance work in 1980 after completing her doctorate. She started Northern Connections as a tech writing service in 1991, and it's branched into editing, photography and graphics. Stratton is a computer graphics expert who also has a teaching background. See the Web site at www.northernconnections.com DuMond says the single worst thing she sees in most writing is "masked language." "It's convoluted," she says. "It's as though there's a distance between the writer and the writing that creates a distance between the writer and the reader." Part of it is putting on airs. "Some people can't resist a three- or four-syllable word," she says. A lot of foggy writing simply stems from foggy thinking. "We are a sound-bite society," DuMond says. "People resist thinking things through." DuMond says she once gave a workshop at a large Bay area company where engineers were skilled in writing complex computer programs but couldn't put two words together in English. The event included some brief writing tips. When she went back six months later she saw that many of the endgineers had little tips ("pick your vocabulary and stick to it") on their computers. "A lot of people see writing as a mystery," DuMond says. "I want to peel away some of the layers of mystery." Can one workshop make a difference? "I think I can give people enough in bite-size chunks to gain some mastery," she says, "if they choose to practice them." Today's Business Index Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA