Category — Writing

If you’re a writer (by which I mean that some major part of your personal or professional life involves putting words together), you probably spend a lot of time in a word processing program such as Microsoft Word.

If you’re like a lot of writers I know, you’re also probably somewhat math-averse, and as a result you probably stay away from spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel. Well, you shouldn’t.

Excel is a powerful tool for all sorts of mathematical and quantitative tasks, but you can do a lot more with it than number crunching. Thanks to Excel’s power to sort and filter, it can be a very powerful tool for writers and editors.

Here are some ways you can use Excel:

1. Record daily word counts.
2. Write a list of ideas (for articles, blog posts, etc.).
3. Keep track of your to-do list.
4. Create an editorial calendar.
5. Keep track of project tasks and their statuses.

So, how do you use spreadsheets?

I’ve got a whole bunch of good links for your mid-week browsing. Here we go:

1. Blogging: Add TwitterCounter to your blog to display how many people are following you on Twitter. I’ve added it over on the left, under the “Connect to Me” section.

2. Marketing: Price vs. customer service, which is more important? MarketingSherpa has a great chart that shows that companies often care more about customer service than price from their vendors. Losing customers? Maybe your pricing isn’t the problem. Maybe you need to take a good long look at your customer service. By the way, think about the implications for blogs, which are free to readers: The quality of what you provide to your readers, how you treat them, and how responsive you are to any comments or emails they send you may well determine how loyal they are.

3. Social media: Angela Connor is the community manager at WRAL.com here in North Carolina. She’s got a really cool blog foused on managing online communities, an increasingly important topic. Check it out.

4. Online marketing: Chris Brogan takes a look at how we can define the spectrum of social media marketing efforts, from banner ads at one end to dialogue between businesses and their customers. This helps to frame the slippery question of what should we do if we want to use social media marketing.

5. Writing: Copyblogger has links to two free teleclasses on copywriting and marketing. Free — so go forth and learn.

6. Social media: The Caffeinated Blog has eight tips for using StumbledUpon effectively. By the way, I love this blog’s name and wish I had thought of it first. But the blogger, Kari Rippetoe, has great content and is worth subscribing to. (And you can Stumble this post if you like — there’s a link at the bottom to make it easy.)

7. Management and career: Jeremiah points out that when you hire someone, you also get their network, including their online network. That can pose challenges for businesses, but it also brings opportunities. This is not a new idea, and applies to offline networks as well as online networks. In The Tom Peters Seminar, Peters describes the modern corporation as a Rolodex (the book was published in ‘94, in the early days of the consumer Internet). The more experienced I get as a professional, the more I think that a greater and greater portion of my value as an employee comes from my existing network and my ability to nurture and grow that network. How are you working on your network?

8. Values: Christopher Penn reminds us that, to quote Spiderman’s Uncle Ben, “with great power comes great responsibility.” What are you using your powers of marketing and communications for?

In the quest to become a better writer, practice is important. Have you already written your first million words? Start on the second million — keep practicing.

There’s lots of value in trying different writing styles, techniques and forms. While you may not stick with some of those experiments, just spending some time struggling with a different form than you’re used to can help make you a better writer in the forms and styles where you spend most of your writing time.
So here are nine ways to stretch your writing skills:

1. Try writing something without using “to be” verbs. That means “The pizza delivery guy was late” has must be rewritten as something like “The pizza delivery guy arrived at the door — late.” To be verbs sneak into our language so much that it becomes easy to rely on those verbs as a crutch rather than reaching for a better word.

2. Write poetry. Haiku, free verse, sonnets, whatever – click here for some examples and definitions of different poetic forms. If you normally write prose, trying poetry will force you to think about word choice, structure and composition in new ways.

3. Give yourself a deadline. Maybe even an unreasonable deadline. Say to yourself “I’m going to finish this blog post in the next 10 minutes.” If you usually procrastinate or write very slowly — stopping to do a little “research” online, getting something to drink, sitting at the keyboard staring into space — a deadline can help you complete projects. That means more writing done, and more writing practice.

4. Revise once more. How many revisions do you usually do on your own work? One, two, more? Whatever the number, do an extra revision and stretch to find ways to improve that piece.

5. Try three different openings. When I was a newspaper reporter, one of my basic principles was that there were many ways to write the “lede” for a story. One of them was the best, and my task as a writer was to find that best opening sentence or paragraph. Try the same thing with your writing. Draft at least two other openings beyond your first try, and see which of the three works best.

6. Twitter — seriously. Trying to write something worth reading in 140 characters is a challenge, and an opportunity to stretch your writing skills. Brian Clark at Copyblogger ran a contest on this recently; check out the results to see just how creative people can be in exactly 140 characters.

7. Write longhand on paper. If you’re reading this, chances are you do most of your writing on a keyboard. Give old-fashioned pen and paper a try. You’d be surprised at how different the process can feel.

8. Use writing prompts. The Internet is full of writing prompts – here’s a collection from Writer’s Digest. Pick one each day and write for 10 or 20 minutes and see what you get. Do this regularly and your writing will get stronger and your creativity will bloom.

9. Free writing. Free writing is the process of simply writing whatever enters your head, without regard to structure or form, for some period of time, such as10 minutes. This can help get you into the writing mode, and help you learn to enter that state more easily.

What’s your favorite way to strengthen your writing skills? Leave an idea in the comments below.

Error-free writing — free of grammar and spelling errors, not errors of opinion — is almost never the result of the first draft or even second draft.

After you’ve written, and rewritten, but before you publish, you need to proofread. Fail to do this well, and you might have a wonderful piece of writing (or a résumé or cover letter or some other critical document) marred by a silly error. I can just about guarantee that the errors you miss in proofreading will stand out like blinking neon signs once it’s too late to fix them.

So, to help you avoid that, here are nine proof reading hacks — tips and techniques designed to help you find mistakes in your writing before someone else does.

1. Ask for help. Even if you’re a good writer, and good at grammar and spelling, even if you’re the one others go to for help editing, it still doesn’t hurt to ask someone else to review your writing. It’s always easier to proof someone else’s work than your own, so don’t place too much confidence in your own proofreading abilities.

2. Wait. If at all possible, let that résumé, blog post or critical proposal sit for 24 hours — or longer — before going back to review it a final time. Going back after you’ve had a break will allow you to approach the document with fresh eyes. You should routinely plan your deadlines, and meet those deadlines, to give yourself this extra time. And even if you can’t give yourself a whole day between final draft and final proofreading, give yourself some time. A few hours, a lunch break, a 10-minute walk around the office to clear your head; any break will improve your chances of finding mistakes.

3. Use the spell checker and grammar checker that comes built into your word processor (Microsoft Word for most of us). Yes, Word’s grammar checker makes mistakes frequently. But even if it produces falsely flags grammatical errors most of the time (which is what I find), that still means that it’s identifying legitimate errors at least occasionally. You can’t use your spell-checker on autopilot, just hitting the ‘replace’ command with whatever the program recommends every time. But the spell-checker will still help you find mistakes. Think of these two functions as an extra pair of eyes on your copy, and use them.

4. Read copy backwards. This doesn’t work very well for lengthy prose, but for short bits of copy — headlines, captions, etc. — reading backwards can help you focus on the words in a new way. You may find that misspellings, grammatical mistakes and other problems suddenly jump out of the screen (or off the page) at you.

5. Highlight every number, date and proper noun and double-check each one against your notes and reference materials. When I was a reporter this was a trick that I, and lots of other newspaper folks, used to eliminate dumb errors. The mind can play tricks on you when you think you remember that someone spelled her name Katherine but it’s really Catherine. Check again, just to be sure.

6. Double-check everything with an apostrophe. Apostrophes, used in possessives and in various contractions, cause writers all sorts problems. “It’s” vs. “its,” “who’s” vs. “whose,” and so forth. And even when you know the right one from the wrong, it’s still easy to make mistakes when you’re hammering away at your keyboard, cranking out something against a deadline. So just go back and check them all.

7. Read it out loud. Problems with missing words, run-on sentences and awkward phrases that you can miss when scanning copy with your eyes suddenly become obvious when you read it aloud. Don’t read too fast, or this won’t work as well, but choose a normal, relaxed, conversational pace. If you work in an office environment where you don’t have much privacy, you can do this quietly and it still works.

8. Proof it on paper instead of on screen. Having edited probably a couple million words that eventually made it into print, I can tell you that nearly everyone is better proofing on paper than on a computer screen. I don’t know if this has something to do with the glare from a computer screen, resolution or some subtle psychological reason, but you’ll catch more mistakes if you print it out and proof with a red pen (or whatever color you prefer) in your hand.

9. Finally, know your trouble spots. Chances are there are certain areas where you tend to make mistakes. Maybe you have trouble spelling certain words, or you always have to look up the rule about using “which” instead of “that,” or you never quite understood the subjunctive. You know what your weaknesses are, so pay close attention to those and be prepared to compensate for them by asking for help, keeping a dictionary and grammar manual close at hand, and making sure you have the extra time available to check. Everybody’s trouble spots are different, but everybody has them. Know what yours are and be sure to compensate.

Have some other proofreading hacks you want to share? Please leave them in the comments.

Good writing is concise. George Orwell advised “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”

The classic manual of modern prose style, “The Elements of Style,” puts it this way:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

So how do you make sure that your emails, blog posts and that novel in progress are lean? In two steps.

Step 1: Write your first draft without worrying about brevity. The first draft is often as much about thinking through the piece as it is about producing polished prose. (The first draft of this post had 765 words; the final, 572.)

Step 2: Cut the fat. Go through the your first draft with your editor’s eye and look for ways to make your sentences and paragraphs clear, compelling and lean.

Here are seven tips to help you whip that flabby first draft into shape:

1. Change passive voice to active voice. In active voice, the subject acts on the object. In passive voice, the object is acted upon by the subject.

Example: “The mail carrier was bitten by the dog” changes to “The dog bit the mail carrier.”

2. Use short words instead of long ones.

Example. “Use” for “utilize,” “about” for “approximately,” etc. Look at those long words and ask yourself if there’s a shorter one that means the same thing.

3. Kill the do-nothing phrases.

If you’ve used expressions such as “the fact that,” “the reason why is,” “it is interesting that” and so forth, you can probably get rid of them.

4. Delete prepositions — of, by, for, into, etc.

Prepositions — those little words show relationships between other words — are often a sign of bloated language. You can’t kill all of them them all, but you can get rid of many. For instance, change “a lot of people” to “many people” or “he heads up a department” to “he heads a department.”

5. Eliminate redundant modifiers.

It’s surprising how many phrases littering our speech are redundant. Some examples:

Core essence becomes essence
Personal friend becomes friend
Violent assault becomes assault
Glare angrily becomes glare
12 noon becomes noon
Deliberately target becomes target

6. Change wordy phrases to simple verbs.

Are you using more words than you need to express simple ideas? Change “make a recommendation” to “recommend”, “give a donation” to “donate,” “work to build” to “build,” and so forth.

7. Get rid of intensifying words.

Usually when you see words such as very, extremely, intensely, and the like, they’re unnecessary. Just get rid of them.

Is there such a thing as writing too tightly?

Yes, but it’s a rare problem. Conciseness isn’t the most important virtue in writing; clarity is more important. If you must choose between the two, choose clarity. Further, a variety of sentence lengths and word choices create rhythm and variety, which please readers. So, yeah, not every sentence has to be stripped down to its bare bones. But lean copy almost always packs more punch.

Got more tips for lean copy? Please share them in the comments.

The New York Times explains the art of choosing key words that will help your news release get picked up by the news media, and search engines. Favorites include terms like ‘green,’ ‘fat,’ and ’secret.’ On the other hand, business jargon such as ‘turnkey’ and ‘mission critical’ are likely to trigger journalists’ BS detectors and have the opposite effect.

Of course, it’s not just the words. There’s actually got to be news value in the release to get the news media to pay attention. Understanding what that is, and how to express it clearly and succinctly in a news release, is a big part of what the art of good news releases is all about.

Link.