How To Write Good & Rules For Writers! – Enjoy

How To Write Good

Frank L. Visco

 

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:

1. Avoid Alliteration. Always.

2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)

4. Employ the vernacular.

5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

8. Contractions aren’t necessary.

9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

10. One should never generalize.

11.Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”

12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

13. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.

14. Profanity sucks.

15. Be more or less specific.

16. Understatement is always best.

17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

18. One word sentences? Eliminate.

19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

20. The passive voice is to be avoided.

21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

23. Who needs rhetorical questions?

 

Rules for Writers

William Safire

1. Parenthetical words however must be enclosed in commas.

2. It behooves you to avoid archaic expressions.

3. Avoid archaeic spellings too.

4. Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.

5. Don’t use commas, that, are not, necessary.

6. Do not use hyperbole; not one in a million can do it effectively.

7. Never use a big word when a diminutive alternative would suffice.

8. Subject and verb always has to agree.

9. Placing a comma between subject and predicate, is not correct.

10. Use youre spell chekker to avoid mispeling and to  catch typograhpical errers. 11.Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.

12. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.

13. Don’t never use no double negatives.

14. Poofread carefully to see if you any words out.

15. Hopefully, you will use words correctly, irregardless  of how others use them.

16. Eschew obfuscation.

17. No sentence fragments.

18. Don’t indulge in sesquipedalian lexicological constructions.

19. A writer must not shift your point of view.

20. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!

21. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.

22. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.

23. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.

24. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.

25.  Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.

26. Always pick on the correct idiom.

27. The adverb always follows the verb.

28. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.

29. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.

30. And always be sure to finish what

 

Statements of Zero Harm & Absolute Preventability of ALL Incidents – Are NOT Logical

Perhaps the real problem of absolute prevention and statements of grand commitment is that they really don’t follow the reasonable logical deduction test. Making statements that are illogical is all to common when trying to inspire humans…trouble is actually doing what you’ve inspied. Example “If you aren’t with us you are against us” – One of the most illogical statements ever uttered by a world leader.
If you work through the following website you will find that “All incident can be prevented” and “Zero Harm” fail dramatically to pass the test of logical reasoning.
Inspiring, perhaps. Demotivating, perhaps. Certainly not logical statements even if you are a CEO and make $$$$$$$$$$$$ in salary and bonuses. Logical reasoning still makes you WRONG in your conclusion.
Have fun…try testing your other beliefs about “safety management” and safety management systems…you’ll find that most of them don’t stand this logical reasoning test.Then re-read Deming and realize that the power of the man’s ideas we’re based in statistically sound logical reasoning and THAT’S why they work.
http://www.indiabix.com/logical-reasoning/logical-deduction/formulas

Thanks to Dave at Riskex…Check it out!

Don’t Jump To Safety Management Solution

“Zero injuries” for a period of time is a great result only when you truly understand why it occurred”

http://tinyurl.com/bmq4jd7

Recommended Reading – The Art of War – Sun Tzu

The world is filled with both large and small conflict. Clever people understand that conflict isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We grow and learn though all of our experiences. I highly recommend Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” The lessons within are powerful and enpowering. In any battle it’s the prepared that will experience positive outcomes.

http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War

The Creation of Safety is a POSITIVE!

 

I’ve been work for many years helping corporations turn their management and creation of safety into a positive aspect of their business. What can be more positive that we’ve done our work today in a way that was efficient, effective, legal, moral, ethical (add any other positive feature you’d like), safe and healthy for our employees and contractors.

Managing our corporations well doesn’t require us to measure the absence of a negative. Safety is positive and observable and therefore measurable. We don’t have to rely on the absence of injuries and costs to tell us we’re doing a good job. In fact it’s a very poor measurement because it could be just happening by luck and then we’re fooling ourselves into believing we’re operating safely when we aren’t. Obviously there are many real life examples that come to mind where horribly tragic incidents resulting in catastrophic losses (human and financial) have occurred when this unreliable measure of safety (lost time injury and incident data) was giving the corporation a false sense of security that safety was in existence when it wasn’t.

Let’s measure the creation of safe production of our goods and services and not the absence of negative outcomes that can just be the result of luck!

Measure, Measure, Measure…the Right Things

From: “Creating & Maintaining a Practical Based Safety Culture”

The processes of measuring safety or leading indicators are as varied as the processes we use to create safety. A leading indicator is an activity done or physical state that is created to increase the likelihood that the goal will be reached. Deming taught us that. Measure the inputs and the outcomes will follow. If you don’t get the outcomes you wanted, then you probably need to adjust what you are doing. What works in safety is simply…what works!

For example, if you don’t want to take the unnecessary risk of using the wrong tool to do a job (which would be by definition “unsafe”) your goal would be to ensure all our employees have access to the correct tool for their job and that they use them.  Then through survey and observation you would measure to what extent that statement (your desired state) is true; in other words, a percentage correct. Over time you would discover where and why these things were true and where in your company they weren’t working. Any changes to your safety efforts would work towards making the statement of creating safety true. This process would become your safety audit which would be far more effective than buying an audit from some company or getting it free from a government organization (don’t get me started on that silly behaviour again). My clients create their own safety audit by establishing their own “future state” of safety, and then they measure their progress against their own vision of what safety is. It works, and it gets high involvement and high success!

This approach is the same one used by most companies to manage their production; they create their products and services this way. It’s an easy culture shift for folks who already measure activities to include safety measures that actually measure the existence and creation of safety. Then through your accountability system (all companies have them) you can motivate through positive consequences the accomplishment of the activities that create safety. Celebrate the accomplishment of the goal! If you take a low number of unnecessary risks you will, over time, accomplish the goal of safety, and the outcome will be very few people get hurt and very little will be property damaged. It’s so very logical!

As for the companies that measure leading indicators…well, I’ve never seen one that doesn’t. Unfortunately, in some cases they are only measuring the things that create production. Many companies are already using process measures of safety (percentage trained, hazards identified and corrected, processes reviewed, time to resolve identified issues). I couldn’t possibly name them all but I have clients in Oil and Gas, Chemical, Municipal, Transportation, Health Care, Education, and Law Enforcement industries who all use leading indicators of safety measures. Rather than name the companies that use and measure leading indicators to manage their journey to safe production, ask the list participants if there is one company out there that doesn’t.

Measure the human activities and physical things (tools, equipment, materials and environmental factors) that create the goals you want to accomplish.

Examples: I want low exposure (usually a defined number that’s measurable) to dust in my production area (that’s the goal to make it safe). I measure and manage the things that would create that goal (dust control measures, changing filters, and compliance with procedures to reduce dust). If I want great safety discussions I measure what creates great meetings (compelling topics, high participation, action items that actually get done). I measure to what degree the leading indicators are performed and then if the end result happened (great meetings) by asking the participants.

Here’s the process:

1. Establish the Goal (Outcome Measure)

I want to create a situation where ________________ is true!

Examples are:

•             Employees wear fall protection,

•             employees use lockout procedures,

•             contractors following company confined space entry procedures,

•             Ideally you’ll also include a measurable number (100% or “all”).

 

2. Measure (Leading indicators)

How I know the above statement is likely to be true. Count (quantity) or measure (quality).

Examples:

•             All areas have fall protection training and equipment,

•             all employees working at heights are observed using the equipment,

•             all employees surveyed say that fall protection is used and readily available.

 

Example: All employees will follow procedure XYZ. (Because we believe that following the procedure reduces our risks to an acceptable level and we’ve defined that procedure as safe). Measure how many are trained in each area to do the procedure. Observe and survey employees to find out if they are using the procedure

3. Celebrate

When you get to the state where the measures tell you that you’ve accomplished what you wanted to all that’s left to do is celebrate!

Measure those things that lead you to believe that you will reach your goal(s) of making it safe. Over time you will indeed accomplish what you set out to achieve.

Doing safety WITH people and not TOO people increases our results in amazing ways!

Followed Robert Long’s web links and found this “spot on”!

Doing safety WITH people and not TOO people increases our results in amazing ways! http://vimeo.com/35943004

Zero Injury Targets…Really?

“Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.” Harriet Braiker

If perfection is the only success, your company employees and managers will all feel like losers…is that really what we want people to feel about their safety efforts? Better in my opinion to “measure what you want to create” In this case “safe production of your goods and services.”

Measure What You Create Not What You Avoid

Stop Preventing & Start Creating

Imagine how hard it was for Edwards Deming in the 1950’s to change the thinking of North American manufacturing from counting their failures and rejects and focusing on 100% reject free to actually measuring and celebrating what they should be creating…product excellence. Deming was so frustrated he had to move to Japan…where many years later the Emperor of Japan presented him with the second highest order of medal available in Japan, honouring him for almost single handily turning Japan’s economy around.

Somehow some in our profession have missed the 80’s revolution where almost all areas of business shifted to measuring what they were creating…product excellence. Here in Safety Management some are still counting and “preventing errors”…how unfortunate, no wonder so many people in the safety business can’t get into a boardroom. We don’t fit with the modern thinking of management. If you want to see a management team get behind something…start measuring them on what they do and not what they avoid. The fact is that measuring the absence of a negative (incidents, injuries and related costs) can sometimes happen entirely by being lucky. There’s nothing more harmful you can do for an executive management team than give them a bonus for being lucky. They soon realize that their inactivity could result in a bonus anyway…so they focus their efforts on what they can do something about…production creation.

“Measure and celebrate what you create not what you are trying to avoid” is the fundamental lesson in business. Create and measure safety excellence and the activities that make a place of work safe and healthy. Measure what you do to make it a safe place to work and you will have very few downgrading incidents to count as an outcome. Then if you do have a downgrading incident…learn from it and continue to strive for safety excellence (and for goodness sake don’t take away everyone’s “safety award”). Celebrate what you do not what you avoid because you’ll never really know if you created the “accident prevention” or if it was just luck. Hard to fake the creation of safe environments and behaviours…none of that is just LUCK.

Of course you can’t get a management team to say they don’t want 100% accident free…but that doesn’t help them achieve anything. Get them to focus on 100% of their safety creating goals (inspections, observations, employee engagement, procedure development, etc.) and eventually you’ll have very few, if any incidents to count…Deming would have wanted it that way.

Measuring the Positives

What are these positives in safety management, some call them leading indicators. I believe that these leading indicators are all too often misunderstood. It’s a simple concept really. What things are present to make me believe that I will get the desired outcome. In Deming’s approach he would say if you want to build a perfect car then focus on perfect parts. So if your goal is to safely produce your product or service then what things are you doing to ensure you achieve that outcome? Safety Tool box meetings may very well be what you think will add to your chances of accomplishing your goal…then simply measure the quality and quantity of your meetings. Machine maintenance checklist, safety observation, safety training, these are all common examples of what we do to make our places of work safe. Measure them often, recognize the effort it takes to make these activities happen and celebrate the positive outcomes.

This is the key to safety excellence.

Safety Isn’t A “Priority”! It’s a VALUE!

The danger of calling “safety” a priority is that the very act of prioritization means logically something is has to be secondary.

The preference should be to call Safety (and other important process issues) values. This way it becomes the “way” the work is accomplished. If an organization is operating outside their values then they are making bad choices for their process solutions. For example I love making money but I’ll only do that “legally”. If any of my ideas for making money go outside that value, then I need to come up with another idea. The same can be true about other values. Safety, environmentally friendly, Legal, financially sound, efficient, effective are all examples of HOW we can choose to work. Now obviously nothing in the human experience of creating work is an absolute pure science. It works within a much larger system of challenges. The problem with SAFETY as a priority is that in most companies it will take only minutes to prove to your staff that it “ISN’T”. Getting people to meet co-existing values happens every day. Every time your construction crew waits for an inspector, every time your corporation gives some of their money to the government for taxes and licences there is a meeting of more than one value. Safety can work the same way.
There’s nothing wrong with having coexisting values. “We at XYZ Corporation will endeavour to provide excellence is services and products through effective, efficient, financially wise, safe, environmentally friendly, etc… production. The list can contain your company values without putting a “top ten” list together. They all need to be considered in the “work plan”. If the solution is efficient and effective but puts the corporation at risk of damaging the environment…then you haven’t found the solution yet!

http://safetyresults.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/is-safety-a-1-priority/

 

Look for the part about Priority (2.02 seconds)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uXtT8sfPBw