Write It Well

Here are two writing techniques to keep your reader’s attention.

A blogger recommends strategies to improve “attention fitness” in “How to Rebuild Your Attention Span and Focus” (lifehacker.com, July 27, 2010). The following headings represent ways Clay Johnson changed his computer habits to boost his attention span:

• Ditched the second monitor
• Turned the mouse off during work time
• Created a proactive routine
• The environment around me

The fourth heading is vague, and it disrupts the sequence of verbs. Precise language and parallel form are two strategies to hook a reader’s eye and keep it on your prose. We’d use them to reword this heading to be “Minimized environmental distractions.”

Johnson focused his own attention by wearing noise-canceling headphones, eating healthy snacks, and consolidating meetings. You can focus your reader’s attention by using precise language and structuring your lists with parallel verbs.

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For tips on parallel structure, list organization, and paragraph sequencing, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

Have you ever looked at a document so long that it becomes hard to see it clearly? Write It Well offers proofreading and editing services for your writing or your employees’ writing.

Just send us a document, noting any concerns or goals you have for it – e.g., whether the reader gets enough information from the text to understand your message. We’ll copyedit a sample portion for free and return it within two days.

You’ll get estimates of the cost and time frame for our sending you back a full, edited, engaging document that will make a great impression.

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Here’s a technique for avoiding typos, and two illustrations of how errors can pop up in carelessly revised text.

The New York Times ran an online article and slideshow this week with two errors that probably came from careless text revisions:

1.

2.

– From Suzy Menkes’s “Conjuring Temples of Deep Desire” and the slideshow

“Peter Marino’s Creative Genius,” nytimes.com, retrieved July 23, 2010

Typo 1 has two periods. Someone probably selected one or more sentences to remove, but didn’t select the final period before hitting delete.

Typo 2 started because the Times uses an optional apostrophe for the plural of acronyms like HMO and LED. For the slide, someone must have inserted the cursor before the s in “LED’s” to type in the word “light” – incorrectly keeping the apostrophe. Plurals formed with incorrect apostrophes can seriously damage a writer’s credibility.

You can solve both problems by selecting your text carefully before you add words or hit delete. And careful proofreading is almost always a good investment of your time!

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For tips on sentence structure and apostrophes, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

Are you ever pressed for time, but need to make sure a document is flawless? Write It Well offers proofreading and editing services for your writing or your employees’ writing.

Just send us a document, noting any concerns or goals you have for it. We’ll copyedit a sample portion for free and return it within two days.

You’ll get estimates of the cost and time frame for our sending you back a full, edited document that will make a great impression.

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It can confuse readers to see inconsistent styles across one organization’s documents. Editorial style guides can solve that problem. They’re collections of rules for all employees to follow – ensuring a standard quality for all the writing an organization sends out.

This weekend, someone at the New York Times website mixed two capitalization styles in one article link. “Case Study” is a regular feature in nytimes.com’s T Magazine, and “Rhubarb Syrup” is an article by its author. The lowercase s in the ad on the top clashes with the Times‘s style guide. It’s inconsistent with both the linked article and even the words immediately before it.

A style guide lays a solid groundwork for an organization’s consistent identity. Once a style guide is distributed, careful proofreading keeps the organization’s image crisp and coherent.

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For guidelines on parallel style in lists and sentences, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

Write It Well offers proofreading and editing services for your own or your employees’ writing. Just send us a sample document, noting any concerns or goals you have for it. We’ll copyedit a sample portion for free and return it within two days.

You’ll get estimates of the cost and time frame for our sending you back a full, edited document that will make a great impression.

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It’s dangerous to rely on a computer to catch all your spelling mistakes. Check out this typo in a recent newspaper headline:

Photo by Flickr user ConanTheLibrarian

Of course, “sirs” should be “stirs.” Gentlemen is also the usual plural of sir, but the spelling “sirs” slips through most spell-checkers.

When any business overlooks important typos, its official voice instantly looks less reliable. It always pays off to invest time in careful writing and careful review of any document before you send it out.

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For guidelines on correct grammar and punctuation in business writing, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

And consider using Write It Well’s proofreading and editing services for your own or your employees’ writing. Just click the more info/contact us button on our homepage to send us a sample document, noting any concerns or goals you have for it.

We’ll copyedit a sample portion for free, and return it within two days. You’ll get estimates of the cost and time frame for our sending you back a full, edited document that will make a great impression.

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In a memo this week, Standards Editor Phil Corbett of the New York Times asked the organization’s writers to avoid the word tweet in most news articles. (A tweet is a message on Twitter; see our blog post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more information.)

Corbett’s rationale is that at the Times,

we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” – as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter – is all three….

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords…. let’s look for deft, English alternatives [to "tweet"]: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update.

In this case, we disagree with the words “jargon” and “deft.” Whether a word is jargon can depend on audience knowledge. We do advise against using recently coined words like tweet without a definition if your readers are unlikely to know them. But it doesn’t take much space to explain that “A tweet is a Twitter post” or that “Tweeting means writing on Twitter.”

The noun tweet is one short word. In comparison, “Twitter message” and “Twitter update” are unnecessarily long, formal, and clumsy phrases. We find it more deft and concise to define the word tweet and then use it freely.

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Later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post.

Retweeting is when a Twitter user clicks a link to add someone else’s tweet to their own Twitter stream. (A tweet is a post on Twitter; see our blog post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more information.)

Retweeting is a way of telling your own Twitter followers, “This tweet is worthwhile.” The “RT” letters at the start of the following Twitter post are a signal that Mary Cullen (M_Cullen) retweeted  (RTed) the following post by Jason Fried (jasonfried):

RT @jasonfried: Jargon is insecurity.

At Write It Well, we’re big fans of plain English over jargon. Jargon in business writing can be a sign of insecurity, or a way to overinflate a simple message to make it look more substantial.

We also admire concise writing. If M_Cullen hadn’t RTed jasonfried’s tweet, we would have missed this pithy, well-phrased statement.

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Later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post.

It’s usually best to avoid all-capital typing for e-mails, text messages, and tweets. It looks like you’re shouting. But check out these two tweets from the New Yorker, about an hour apart, with the time frames of  ”coming up” and then “NOW“:

Is college worth the price?:http://tny.com/cxoTFm; join the live chat at 12 ET, or ask a question now:http://tny.com/b2nZcR

Is college worth the price? Join our live chat RIGHT NOW:http://tny.com/b2nZcR

Twitter updates constantly. This uppercase “RIGHT NOW” is a case of genuine urgency: join in now, or lose out! If you followed the New Yorker‘s tweets, you’d see they’re carefully written and that this is almost the only uppercase typing they use for an entire page.

We’d say that if you regularly write clear, well-planned tweets, then some all-caps writing is fine. Just deploy it very strategically. If you save uppercase typing to highlight rare, urgent situations, then you won’t look like you’re crying (or tweeting) wolf!

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For a fun, unique case of all-capital tweeting, see FEMINIST HULK‘s page on Twitter.

Also see our post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more suggestions about maintaining a professional sound on the site. And later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post!

All this month’s blog posts will be about maintaining a professional image on Twitter. First up is a tweet from the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Twitter account:

Win 8 $100 gift certificates to participating Dine About Town restaurants. Details and contest entry at: http://sfg.ly/doQSZj

At 125 characters (with spaces), this tweet is short and sweet. It’s 15 characters under Twitter’s maximum 140-character limit. With this extra space to burn, we’d suggest two changes.

First, no colon is necessary after “at,” since you’d write “it’s at this webpage” instead of ”it’s at: this webpage.” Also, it might be clearer to spell out the number 8. Winning “eight $100″ certificates would be more immediately clear than “8 $100″ ones.

When you have the space, standard punctuation and full spellings make most tweets clearer.

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See our post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more suggestions about maintaining a professional sound on Twitter. And later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post!

These criteria translate into actions. Here’s our checklist of actions that effective business writers take:

• State the main point clearly, right at the beginning
• Organize information logically
• Leave out unnecessary information
• Use short sentences and paragraphs
• Eliminate unnecessary words
• Include all necessary information
• Use active, precise language and plain English
• Use correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling

Any time you get confused or distracted as you read, ask yourself if the writer neglected one of these criteria. Or if you ever feel lost as you’re writing, assemble your ideas by taking these actions.

Most business readers will only give a document about fifteen seconds to catch their attention. When readers’ time is valuable, the rest of the document has to hold their attention. The best way to make sure people read your whole document is to focus your message and then deliver it in clear, logical, correct language.

So take the time to think about your readers’ needs, organize your information logically, and present it clearly. Easy-to-grasp language and correct grammar and punctuation will keep your readers focused on your message. Considering these criteria and taking these actions will boost your professional image and credibility.