Reducing risk, establishing consistency, and creating effective documentation for successful business growth. Do you believe your small business is running smoothly? Do your customers receive a consistent experience every time they purchase a product or service? Does your team consistently rely on you and your expertise? If you answered yes to these and yet, you…
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Maintain Your Business Documentation with a Maintenance Cycle
Your department has worked hard to create user guides, training programs or governance documentation to help your company run smoothly and be compliant. What happens when something changes, and your documentation needs to be updated? Regulatory, technical or organisational changes can force you to run your documentation through a maintenance cycle. A maintenance cycle is…
Focusing on Readability Increases Your Content Value
As a content creator, you put tons of effort into writing posts for your blog and your social media platforms. But are you doing everything you can to make that content easy for the reader to consume? What have you done to improve your readability? Readability is the critical element missing from a lot of…
Word Confusion: Clarity Needed
We here at Cohort enjoy the opportunity to assist those in the larger writing community by providing a bit of clarity to commonly used terms. We were recently asked the following question: Q: Could you please clarify the differences between policies, standards, guidelines, and procedures? Most people I know, myself included, struggle with explaining these…
Advantages of Written Communication for Businesses
When presenting information to a client, there are two main ways: you can speak to them by phone or in person, or you can put your words into writing in the form of handouts and emails. Which form is better? Looking at this topic from a business perspective, a follow-up question should be asked: How…
Using Formatting to Improve Perceived Quality of Writing
Imagine this … you walk into a job interview for the position of your dreams. It’s a position that you have been heading towards your entire career. It’s now time to impress the executives on the hiring board. Do you wear your: a) tuxedo? b) shorts, t-shirt, and sandals? c) best suit? d) most appropriate…
Determining Your Required Edit
Speed. Quality. Cost. The key trifecta an overworked overwhelmed manager faces when putting a project together. Generally, the premise is that you can pick two options: if you quickly want high quality, it’s going to be expensive; quality at low cost is likely to be slow; and fast, low-cost work is probably not going to be…
Technical Editing Builds Credibility with Your Audience
Words matter. If a writer wants their words to be read and clearly understood by another reader (i.e., not a private journal), then quality and care must be used before the document is submitted. Indeed, the overall quality and organization of the document, website, or report doesn’t matter, if there are a substantial number of…
Creating Business Documentation Infrastructure
Hello and welcome to our first blog post. In this article, I want to show you how easy it is to implement basic documentation infrastructure. This applies if you’re an employee or a contractor. Following these steps will give your documentation a more polished and professional look. More importantly, it will enable you to focus…