"Working with us" section, copy written in January/February 2023 in cooperation with JRC HR colleagues.

About page, copy written in March 2023 based on JRC documents: - Revitalising the JRC Strategy 2030; - JRC strategy 2030; - JRC work programme 2023 - 2024: Brochure; - JRC Work Programme 2023 -2024: Factsheets; - JRC portfolio cards

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that can have anywhere from three to seven phases, depending on whom you talk to. The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the d.school) proposes the five-stage design thinking model: Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test.

The root of the problem lies in our desire to impress. Thesaurus carpet-bombings and long-winded sentences are commonly mistaken for fine writing because they feel authoritative and intellectual. But they’re just masks; effective writing is lean, clean, and easy to read.

From providing accurate context to creating a cohesive structure, each of these key principles can elevate your content designs and ensure you’re communicating effectively with your audience

How to communicate effectively when users fail and succeed (shared on LinkedIn by Vitaly Friedman)

What users believe they know about a user interface impacts how they use it. Mismatched mental models are common, especially with designs that try something new.

If you're a marketer, manager, developer, designer or writer wanting to up your UX writing game, then these guides are right up your alley.

Techniques like summaries, bullet points, callouts, bolding, and helpful visuals improve comprehension and engagement with content exceeding 1,000 words.

How writing reframes our knowledge and drives our decisions. Our message is effectively drowning in a sea of organizational and semantic noise that is part and parcel of the product itself. how do we make this easier on the user? Nope… not empathy. Writing. Writing about anything presupposes some degree of understanding of the context.

"Easy writing makes hard reading" - Ernest Hemingway "The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty" - John Steinbeck

ProPublica’s plain language experiment is a first for a mainstream news organization. Disability experts say it shouldn’t be the last.

An examination of translating text to make it as accessible as possible. Looking at how to make writing easier to read

Easy-to-read information is important for people with intellectual disabilities. It is important so they can: Learn new things. Take part in society. Know their rights and stand up for them. Make their own choices.

What makes a text nice to read? To know more about this, it is important to take a closer look at how people are reading. Additionally, it may be the case that someone is impaired, physically or mentally, to read a text. How does it work?

Financial writing is full of jargon and complexity. But a series of research suggests that investors are drawn to simple, clear writing with short sentences. The simple reason is that complex writing is off-putting — people tune out and find it dull, a fact confirmed by neuroscience research.

In this guide, I’m going to teach you my step-by-step process for writing high-converting website copy.

Aaron Berman shared some useful writing tips for anyone writing on complex issues that he learned writing the (US) President's Daily Briefs. Check out the five tips below, illustrated with examples from Star Wars and Star Trek.

Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn how to write and present information that aligns with users’ needs and online reading behaviors.

...from news media to legal guidance to academic research, the way we write often creates barriers to who can read it. Plain language—a style of writing that uses simplified sentences, everyday vocabulary, and clear structure—aims to remove those barriers.

Plain language and website fonts affect the reading experience more than you think

"...when reading a book excerpt or newspaper article, students were better at recalling “other relevant information” when reading in the print versus the digital medium."

Forcing users to browse PDF files causes frustration and slow task completion, compared to standard webpages. Use PDF only for documents that users will print. In those cases, following 10 basic guidelines will minimize usability problems.

Take a tip from the Times. Write headlines that: Average 8 or 9 words Never grow longer than 14 words Sometimes have as few as four words

Clarity, not creativity, is the backbone of good UX writing. Choose simple words and craft shorter sentences. Explain acronyms users might not know. Use proper punctuation. Be extra careful about things like cleverness, wordplay, and idioms that might affect usability. Above all, write to be understood.

Probably my biggest frustrations ... is the utter contempt they seem to hold content in. ... they won’t hire a professional copywriter to work on the content ... never teach content creators how to create appropriate web content.

Imperative voice gets shared. Imperative voice boosts email click, open and read rates.

"Users rarely read an entire webpage. That means you need to adopt a different style when writing for the web. A style that accommodates this lack of attention."

"understand the digital reader’s brain, and to get a couple of concrete writing tips for your next digital text." "Nothing can surpass a text when it comes to transforming abstract thoughts into concrete expression."

The “known-new contract” is a linguistic concept used to describe how writers achieve cohesion between sentences by first presenting what readers already know (information previously presented) before introducing new information.