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Helpful advice on saving your scraps.
One of the all-time toughest choices for any business writer is deciding what to leave in your rough draft and what to take out. This vexed me for years. I would waste precious hours trying to decide...
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What kind of writing ends up in my bucket of scraps?
In my previous post (Helpful advice on saving your scraps.), I explained how I became a bolder, faster editor by creating a section for scraps at the end of my documents. If there’s a sentence or...
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The Affect Effect and how to get it right.
I completely empathize with anyone who struggles over the uses of affect and effect – words that sound the same, but aren’t. I gained my empathy for the spelling confused by traveling to England for a...
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How to write like Julia Child.
Suddenly, America is taking a fresh look at one of its great communicators, Julia Child. And love is in the air. Her magnum opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, has rocketed to dizzying new...
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What I learned from a film critic about good and bad writing.
A number of years ago, I created some TV spots for a major metro newspaper. The idea was to showcase some of the paper’s better-known writers and offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their world....
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What your English teacher never should have taught you.
It’s a dark art. Most of us learned it first as schoolchildren and then perfected it later as college freshmen. We did it because the teacher asked for a three-page paper, but we only had two pages...
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Three grammar rules that are okay to break.
Grammar is great. You should learn the basics of good grammar and stick to them. It’s not that hard. Just remember that grammar is supposed to add clarity to your communication. Not confusion. So if...
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The best writing mistakes and how to make them.
Make mistakes. Make a lot of them. And make them often. It’s the only way to get your thoughts on paper, and you’ll enjoy the writing process more. I actually damaged some muscles in my hands several...
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The easiest way to get a response in business communications.
What’s the easiest way to get a response from your readers? Ask for it. Seriously. You’d be surprised how many emails, presentations, and other documents don’t. Yet, it’s one of the quickest, simplest...
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Life is too short to memorize 25,376 writing tips.
If you’ve ever looked at all the things you need to do to become a better communicator…and panicked…then, this is for you. You had great intentions. You were going to improve your business writing...
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