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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Inconsistent or sloppy writing can distract your readers. Distracted readers may find something else to pay attention to.

Here’s some inconsistent formatting in a list of today’s most popular articles on the New Yorker website:

Either these underlined letters should be lowercased, or the circled letters should be capitalized. This small inconsistency could distract a reader from the content long enough to think of another site to go read, or another activity that’s more urgent than reading anything.

That’s one reason it’s smart to save time to proofread your business’s writing, even with limited staff and tight deadlines. Consistent, good writing always makes your message more compelling.

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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.

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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Twitter: A Write It Well Guide is an interactive, three-page PDF with tips businesspeople can use to maintain a professional tone on Twitter.

You’ll find suggestions for framing a 140-character Twitter post and for brainstorming several kinds of business tweets.

We also recommend several excellent online sources about Twitter, with the citations linked directly to the Web. View and download the full PDF!

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