Manage Your Writing

This week: Go "which-hunting"

This week, as you revise, follow the advice in Strunk and White's Elements of Style, and go "which-hunting." That is, look for places you have used the words which, who, or that to introduce a subordinate clause, and see if you can eliminate the need for that clause.

For example,

Count the chairs which are in the room

can be revised to

Count the chairs in the room.

Not only have we eliminated two words, we have kept the reader's brain from having to process a whole extra clause.

As Dorothy found out, not all whiches are bad. But watching for them is still a good idea.

What's Your Point?

David Speaker, at Business Writer's Blog, makes a good point about points:

Before you start writing, ask yourself this: "do I know what my point is? What is my point?" Define it for yourself.

I can ususally tell when I see poor writing because I begin asking "what's the point?". Readers should not have to ask this question. If they do, the writer is making them work too hard, or has become lost in the superfluous.

The old adage "First tell the reader what you're going to say, then say it, then tell them what you said." is one way of making your point. But, it's not always necessary and carries its own risks (like boring your reader or wasting their time). Usually you can make your point once, as long as it's clear and not lost in the mix.

During your final review assure that you have in fact made your point. Have I made my point?

Action generates inspiration

“We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.” —Frank Tibolt

(Link: Happy Quote (Reviewed at WorkHappy.net))

This week: Start a "steal" file

This week, watch for a piece of writing that appeals to you, something that does its job especially well.

Then,

• make a copy of it
• highlight, or note in the margin, what makes it especially effective
• put it in a file folder labeled "steal"

The next time you're stuck planning or revising a piece of your own writing, grab your "steal" file—and be inspired!

If you're not sure what to say . . . .

Marketing whiz Seth Godin makes a great point on his blog:

Webpage words are free in that they don't cost anything to write. They are not free, though, because they keep the user from what they really need, and increase the chance that they'll just leave.

If you're not sure what to say, say nothing.

(Thanks to Matthew at Bad Language for the link.)

Short words are best

In his blog Bad Language, London-based Matthew Stibbe cites (by way of Atlantic Monthly) research by Daniel M. Oppenheimer that "shows that besides clouding the meaning, the use of long words actually makes the reader think the author is stupid."

In the title of his post, "Short Words Are Best," Matthew nods to Winston Churchill, who wrote, in a sentence made up entirely of one-syllable, Anglo-Saxon origin words:

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

The difference between information and knowledge

"Appreciate the difference between information and knowledge," says Jim Roe, who has worked as a corporate VP. "If you are writing to give information, you are wasting your time and the reader’s. We are being buried in useless information. The Internet and mass publications flood us with information. Corporations sends out reams of information to us via email, faxes, computer reports, and pamphlets. 99.9% of it is useless to me. I do not seek information. I seek knowledge that I can convert to understanding and then, hopefully, to wisdom."

This week: simplify your language

This week, after you draft each piece of writing, read it aloud as if you were reading to a six-year-old child. Ask yourself, "What words would the child not understand?"

If you can think of simpler replacements for those words, consider using them. You may find that your writing becomes more effective even for educated adults.

Don't hold back

On Info-Articles, Melinda Copp offers "Five EASY Ways to Improve Your Business Writing." My favorite:

4. Don’t Hold Back

If you’re writing something, whatever it is, you obviously have a reason for doing it. Maybe you want to inform your employees of a new policy, or maybe you want to share the benefits of your latest product with prospective clients. Regardless of the
reason, you must make it clear to your readers. Otherwise, they won’t read past your first sentence.

Be direct, use strong verbs, and make powerful points. If you’re trying to sell your services, tell your readers how you’re different from the competition. Or if you need
support for an upcoming project, tell your readers how they can help. Don’t make them figure out what you want. Tell your readers why they need to read your piece, what’s in it for them, and what action you want them to take.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars

In an interview in the New York Times, Ed  Reilly, president and chief executive of the American Management Association, makes an interesting point on the real costs of ineffective business writing:

I've heard people describe e-mail as the DNA of business communication because it never goes away. You want to be careful about what you say. Even for people like  Bill Gates, e-mails can come back to haunt them. You want to have appropriate policies for e-mail, for instant messaging and for blogging, which is pretty quickly becoming a big phenomenon in businesses. On top of that, you want to make sure that your employees have requisite skills in core time management. You want to make sure that people have the right kinds of communications skills, not only the ability to write a coherent sentence, but also to have a strategy of what they want to communicate and who needs to know about it.

Companies go to great lengths to set up lists of authorized approvals, meaning who can approve what size of purchase. But you will find that people who are not authorized to spend $100 on their own are authorized to send e-mails to people and waste hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of company time.

(Thanks to 43 Folders for the referral.)