Manage Your Writing

This week: Consider your reader's feelings

All of us come to everything we write and read as people, with feelings and attitudes. Too often, as business writers, we forget that, thinking of ourselves and our readers not as people but as profit centers or as boxes on a line-and-block chart.

This week, as you begin a writing job, ask yourself what feelings about this message you and your reader share, and what feelings you don't share. If you can answer that question, you'll be a more effective writer.

This week: Pay no attention to your thumb

I heard once about a psych-out technique to use if you're playing tennis against a tough opponent. After watching your opponent warm up, you say to him or her, "As I've been watching you, I've finally realized how to improve my backhand. It's the way you hold your thumb. How do you do that exactly?"

Unless your opponent is on to you, he or she will probably say, "Gee, I don't know. I've never thought about it."

"Well, think about it," you say. "I'll really appreciate any advice."

Then you start the match. If your opponent has fallen into your trap, he or she will be focusing on that thumb, perhaps for the first time--not on the ball, not on the net, not on the lines on the court. And this fact may give you the edge you need.

That's how drafting works. If, while you draft, you're focusing on spelling, punctuation, grammar, and the hundreds of other things you can (and should) fix later, then you won't write as clearly and coherently as you could. This week, pay no attention to your metaphorical thumb. You'll play a better game.

Fifty resources

At Job Profiles, Christina Laun has published "50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers." They're worth a long look.

This week: Do it three times

Historian Paul Fussell once confessed:

Crappy work I do twice, good work I do three times.

This week, just as an experiment, don't just "do" each piece of work twice (drafting and revising), but take a minute or two to revise again. See if that third time pays off for you.

This week: Leave out what your readers will skip

In his book The Invisible Touch, marketing expert Harry Beckwith writes:

Skip the balderdash, the puffing, the filler. Tell me. Tell me the same way novelist Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty) writes books. Asked to explain why his books were so popular and so easy to read, Leonard answered: "Simple. I just leave out the parts that readers skip."

This week, as you revise your messages, put yourself in your reader's position and ask yourself what, as that reader, you would skip over. Leave that out.