Manage Your Writing

This week: Start with a bang

Mark McCormack, in his book What They Still Don't Teach You in Harvard Business School, listed what he called the eight "toughest" messages to deliver:

(1) This is how you do it. (2) I want to sell you. (3) I goofed. (4) I have some bad news for you. (5) You did a great job. (6) Dear Boss, you're wrong. (7) This is my demand. (8) This is how you rate.

McCormack continued, "I would read a memo that began with any one of these sentences."

This week, as you revise, pay special attention to the first sentences of your messages. Will they make your reader keep reading?

This week: Go for a Pulitzer

Legendary newsman Joseph Pulitzer wrote,

Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided its light.

Not a bad checklist. This week, as you revise, ask yourself if your writing meets Pulitzer's four criteria: is it brief, clear, picturesque, and accurate? When it is, give yourself a personal Pulitzer Prize. 

This week: Look smarter

Cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, wrote:

If you want to advance in management, you have to convince other people that you're smart. This is accomplished by substituting incomprehensible jargon for common words. For example a manager would never say, "I used my fork to eat a potato." A manager would say, "I utilized a multitined tool to process a starch resource." The two sentences mean almost the same thing, but the second one is obviously from a smarter person.

In reality, some research shows that when readers and listeners can't understand your sentences, they think of you as less intelligent, not more.

This week, as you revise, look for ways to simplify your language. You'll look smarter.

This week: Use "real" verbs

Look at this sentence:

The committee reached an agreement on the project.

The verb is reached, but this is not the "real" verb, the action that the committee performed. The committee didn't reach; it agreed. Reached is a filler verb; the real verb, agree, has been changed into the noun agreement. In many contexts, the sentence can be revised to

The committee agreed on the project.

This week, as you revise, look for action verbs that have been changed into nouns. Consider making these "real" verbs the verbs of your sentences.

This week: Sign on for Power Writing

I've just finished reading Daphne Gray-Grant's 8 1/2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better. It's a well-crafted and engaging book, genuinely fun to read.

Daphne's method for effective, efficient writing is much like mine. That's not surprising; we've both learned from years of experience as working writers. But her book has three unique features that make it a good complement to mine, and that will keep me returning to it, as well as recommending it to others:

• The best "capture" I've ever seen of an effective reviser's thought process
• Some great techniques for pushing the limits of what a word-processing program can do for a writer 
• A super list of tips for writing a book

This week, please visit Daphne's site: www.publicationcoach.com. You can, of course, order her book there. But at the very least, subscribe to her free e-mail newsletter, Power Writing. I learn something from it every week, and I bet you will too.

Book signing in Baltimore

I'm in Baltimore, Maryland, this week, conducting writing training for the U.S. Social Security Administration.

On Saturday, July 26, from 2 to 4 p.m., I'll be signing my latest book at the Barnes and Noble store in Towson, Maryland. If you're in the area, please drop by! I'd love to meet you.

This week: Give yourself assignments

In my writing and training, I often talk about the Internal Writer and the Internal Editor, and the importance of keeping them separate. For most of us, that means shutting off the Internal Editor while we draft, so that our Internal Writer can get the words down without interference. When the words are on paper or screen, the Internal Editor can come back to revise them.

But in the outer world, editors (especially newspaper editors) do more than revise; they also assign. They send writers out with instructions.

That's what the planning stage of the writing process is for: making time for our Internal Editor to give our Internal Writer the most complete assignment possible. Before the Internal Writer begins drafting, the Internal Editor should be able to say, "I want you to write for this reader, for this purpose, using these materials, in this order. And here are a lot of details about each." 

Don't you feel more confident about your work when your boss tells you clearly what she wants? Well, by going through a good planning stage, that's what you can do for yourself.

This week, don't start drafting until you've given yourself the clearest, most complete assignment possible. Then watch your writing improve.

This week: Put it in context

Daphne Gray-Grant writes, in the June 10, 2008, issue of her wonderful e-mail newsletter, Power Writing:

I recently finished Steven Johnson's fascinating work The Ghost Map, which is the story of London's cholera outbreak of 1854. This non-fiction book is as exciting as a murder mystery, which, in a way, it is. But I digress... Have a look at the author's description of the population of Dickensian London:

"The subdistrict of Berwick Street on the west side of Soho was the most densely populated...that made up Greater London, with 432 people to the acre."

My reaction a reader? Well, that sounds sort of bad, I thought. But then I read his next line. "Even with its skyscrapers, Manhattan today only houses around 100 per acre." Suddenly, I got the point.

"Put it in context," says Daphne.

This week, look for ways to provide necessary or helpful context for the points you make in your business writing. You'll be more effective if you do.

This week: Find the lightning

Our job as business writers is not to use words that mean the right thing to us. Our job is the find the best words to convey our meaning to our readers.

That's one reason why the revision stage of writing--even if it takes only a minute or two--is so important. It frees us from having to settle for the first word that came to our mind as we drafted. It gives us a chance to choose, from a number of possible words, the one word that best does the job.

Mark Twain said, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning-bug." This week, don't settle for the lightning bug. Find the lightning!

The enemy of good thinking

"Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking."

--Warren Buffet, quoted by Stephen Zades in HR Innovator, Nov/Dec 2003, p. 4