Manage Your Writing

This week: Make it "perfect"

This blog has almost completely ignored what I call "finishing": spelling, punctuation, and other mechanical concerns. In my experience, such concerns aren't much of a problem for most business writers.

But from time to time we need to listen to the late Malcolm Forbes:

Make it perfect. No typos, no misspellings, no factual errors. If you're sloppy and let mistakes slip by, the person reading your letter will think you don't know better or don't care. Do you?

This week, pay special attention to the "finish" you put on your writing. As you finish each piece of writing spend two or three extra minutes making sure it's as perfect as possible. 

But add those minutes only at the end of your writing process. Don't paint the house until you've built it.

This week: What she said

Joanna Young, of the Confident Writing blog, has written a terrific guest post for Brad Shorr's Word Sell blog. Little did she know she'll be, in effect, doing the same for me.

But her list of 10 Ways to Free Your Business Writing is just too good not to get as much circulation as possible. So . . . .

This week, read Joanna Young's 10 Ways to Free Your Business Writing. You'll be glad you did.

This week: Ignore the prattle

Natalie Goldberg advises:

It is important to separate the creator and the editor or internal censor. . . . If the editor is absolutely annoying . . . sit down whenever you need to and write what the editor is saying: give it full voice--"You are a jerk, who ever said you could write, I hate your work, you suck. I'm embarrassed, you have nothing valuable to say, and besides, you can't spell . . . ." Sound familiar?

She continues, "The more clearly you know the editor, the better you can ignore it. After a while, like the jabbering of an old drunk fool, it becomes just prattle in the background."

This week, pay special attention to your Internal Editor. Listen for its voice. Then realize that it's just prattle in the background, and begin to ignore it.

This week: Ask for guesses

In March, I wrote about the use of readability formulas. But there's another tool you can use to measure the readability of a draft--a tool that takes an actual reader into account.

This tool is based on the fact that at the level of sentences and words, the most readable writing is also the most predictable. Readable writing generally (not always, of course) fulfills the reader's expectations. Therefore, you can test the readability of a draft by leaving out selected words and having a reader guess what they are.

This week, consider trying this tool (it's formally called a "cloze test"):

1. Count back 100 or 200 words from the end of your draft. (The exact number doesn't matter.)
2. Go through this ending and replace every tenth word--whatever that word is--with a blank. Make all blanks the same length, regardless of the lengths of the words they replace.
3. Save this changed draft under a different name (so you can get back to your original).
4. Ask someone else to read this copy of your draft and guess the missing words.
5. Note the "hits" and "misses," and ask yourself whether each miss could have been a hit if it, or words before it, were changed. (Not all misses are bad things. Any writing will, and should, have some surprises.)
6. If you discover places where rewriting will help, do similar rewriting throughout your draft.

This week: Repair--no, fix--your writing

In his book Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith writes:

The famous direct-mail writer John Caples once changed one word in an ad--substituting "fix" for "repair"--and increased the response to the ad 20 percent.

This week, as you revise, look for opportunities to do the same, replacing longer words with shorter, simpler ones. Who knows? Your positive responses may increase 20 percent