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Often a document can fail even though it is written in English that is impeccably correct and entirely appropriate stylistically for the purpose and the target audience. Why?

Have you ever opened a pamphlet or a website in search of a quick answer and found yourself ploughing unwillingly through a sea of unrelieved black type? Have you ever tried to read a report with numbered paragraphs and wondered which section this paragraph was the sub-subsection of? Have you ever tried to make sense of a paragraph of confusing statistics that would have been as plain as day in tabular or graphic form?

These, and other similar problems, are the fault of bad design and lack of consideration for the target audience. The way the information is presented to the reader is as much the writer’s responsibility as grammar is.

This does not mean that you have to become an ace designer. It does mean, however, that you have to think of the visual impact of your words and the way they appear on the page. You have to consider such things as:

 logical paragraphing

 use of white space

 use of different typefaces, bold type, italics and so on

 signalling new information – for example, by graded headings and num­­bering

 use of graphics to give information – especially statistics.

All the points outlined above, and many more, will be discussed in this book. When you have worked through it, either on your own or in a course, you will be equipped to write effectively. The book does not provide you with magic formulas for writing every document you might ever need to write. Rather, it gives you the basic knowledge you need to write effectively, and some examples of the more common documents – it is up to you to put the principles into practice in every document you write from now on.

So what makes writing ‘correct’? Is correct writing governed by some ‘rules’ that we must follow? Is it the reader’s perception of correctness? Is it gut feeling? Let’s finish this first chapter by having a quick look at correctness in general and some of the terms that we’ll use in the rest of the book.