Write It Well

Customers may give up trying to read your prose if you confront them with long-winded blocks of text. Lists can be an easy formatting solution to the challenge of keeping readers’ attention.

Here’s a beautifully formatted list from a New York Times article about a badly designed website:

When conceiving a contest — or any other attempt to drive traffic with user-generated content — it’s important to keep a few things in mind:

•    Make sure the contest aims at an audience of potential and current customers.
•    Give them incentives to contribute (prizes, recognition).
•    Give them reasons to keep coming back (picking daily or monthly winners).
•    Promote the contest through multiple channels (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube).
•    Promote the contest on appropriate travel blogs.
•    Create new contests and promotions on a regular basis.

See how much less appetizing those sentences look in paragraph form?

When conceiving a contest — or any other attempt to drive traffic with user-generated content — it’s important to keep a few things in mind. First, make sure the contest aims at an audience of potential and current customers. Give them incentives to contribute (prizes, recognition). Give them reasons to keep coming back (picking daily or monthly winners). Promote the contest through multiple channels (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). Promote the contest on appropriate travel blogs. And create new contests and promotions on a regular basis.

Even with a sequence of crisp sentences that all start with calls to action, the paragraph format buries the writer’s ideas.

Strategically deployed lists hand your ideas to a reader item by item – making you likelier to hold your reader’s attention through every line.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two chapters on punctuation as well as tips for formatting a bulleted or numbered list. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Repeating the same part of speech can help busy readers understand you faster. This list of adjectives by David Pogue is a breeze to read:

Windows Phone 7.5 is gorgeous, classy, satisfying, fast and coherent.

This list of nouns is almost as easy to follow:

Each [tile] represents something you’ve put there for easy access: an app, a speed-dial entry, a Web page, a music playlist or an e-mail folder.

And these verbs hand readers an easy series of actions:

[The phone is] great at understanding its Big Four commands: Call, Text, Find (on the Web) and Open (an app).

Breakdowns in parallel verb structure are the bane of many business writers (e.g., “I should do four things: call Kim, text Joe, finding my wallet, and open an account”).

It’s necessary to keep verbs in the same tense (“call Kim, text Joe, find my wallet, and open an account”) to help readers zip through your prose.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes chapters on verbs and sentence structure. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Casual business writing can be tricky: how can you make your Web copy sound welcoming, yet professionally credible? If you’re concerned that your prose may sound sloppy rather than casual, grammar rules can offer you some safe and reliable guidelines.

Here are some nonstandard sentences in a pleasant T magazine article about Blue Bottle Coffee. The magazine’s handwritten text emphasizes the quotes’ intentional informality:

Since the first line is a question, standard English would require a comma after the name. Of course, the first words of the sentences would also be capitalized.

A businessperson might frown at the grammar of that last sentence if it were part of a formal commercial mission statement. Here’s a revised, correct sentence about coffee: “It makes us smarter, funnier, and healthier, and it is delicious.”

A little knowledge of parallel verb structure is all you’d need to dress up the informal look of this prose and feel sure that it’s appropriate for a formal business document.

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to double-check your punctuation or untangle your sentences? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a section on parallel verb structure and two full chapters on punctuation.

We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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Bulleted lists can help readers follow your ideas as easily as they’d step down a staircase. Here are two illustrations, starting with an intricate sentence about an array of covers you can buy to protect an iPad 2:

There is the shockproof CoverBuddy from SwitchEasy.com, available in 10 colors (plus ultraclear) for $25; the Snap Shield cover from Belkin.com, which comes in clear, Apple Pink and Smoke and sells for $30; the BackBone from ifrogz.com, which sells for $35 in matching Smart Cover colors, plus white and clear; or the higher-end iFrogz Summit for $60, which combines a folio style with a snap-in core.

— Mickey Meece, “Options Abound to Protect the iPad,” nytimes.com, July 6, 2011

The same information is much easier to read when it’s unpacked and reformatted as a bulleted list:

Here are four cover options for the iPad 2:

• The shockproof CoverBuddy from SwitchEasy.com is available in 10 colors (plus ultraclear) for $25
• The Snap Shield cover from Belkin.com sells for $30 and comes in clear, Apple pink and smoke
• The BackBone from ifrogz.com sells for $35 in matching Smart Cover colors, plus white and clear
• The higher-end iFrogz Summit sells for $60 and combines a folio style with a snap-in core

Any time a series of items gets longer than about 30 words, back up and ask yourself if the information would be easier to follow in list format. Your readers may thank you for helping them move forward.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar is a thorough review of the fundamental grammar you need to project credibility, clear thought, and professionalism through all your writing. The book includes two user-friendly chapters on punctuation, tips for using colons correctly in list introductions, and tips to maintain parallel structure inside a list.

Do you have an important document but not enough time to polish it? Just use Write It Well’s editing services. We’ll make sure the prose is correct, clear, concise, and engaging so your readers will follow all your ideas easily and respect your voice.

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A headline as simple as “10 Things to Do in Singapore” can be perfect. In this case, it’s the title for a post on a top-ranked blog about food and travel.

This short headline accomplishes three tasks:

• It specifies a topic (what to do in Singapore)
• It identifies a target audience (anyone who’s going there or would like to)
• And it arouses curiosity (in this context, about worthwhile local cuisine and cooking lessons)

Furthermore, author Matt Armendariz keeps his readers’ attention through article headings. He adds one for each of the ten things to do – e.g.,

9. Have a Soft-Boiled Egg And Kaya Toast for Breakfast .…
7. Visit 25 Degrees Celsius Café and Bookstore .…
1. Experience Hawker Stands

Each of these ten headings starts with an imperative-mood verb. This parallel verb structure is another great tactic to help readers follow your meaning and to keep them engaged with your topic.

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Click here for Write It Well’s list of nine quick ways to make your headlines stronger.

Our book Professional Writing Skills shows you how to use verbs skillfully, identify the main action in a long word group, and write concisely. All these skills are necessary to create effective headlines. The book also covers parallel structure and effective numbered and bulleted lists.

Too busy to organize long documents into clearly marked sections? Want some help crafting engaging prose? Hire Write It Well to copyedit your documents. We’ll help your writing become engaging, well organized, concise, and clear.

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If you get stuck when you’re writing a headline or a sentence, try rearranging the words. Here’s an example of an awkward two-part headline:

What “cage-free,” “fertile” and other egg labels mean:

“Fertile” is kind of goofy, “vegetarian-fed” is kind of weird, but “cage-free” is serious (and big) business

– Francis Lam, Salon.com

Good writing usually feels effortless to read. The article’s subtitle is long, but it’s easy to understand because its structure is parallel.

The main title is a little difficult to take in. The reader has to wait to see the crucial verb – “What this, that, and other labels mean.” That’s a long time to wait for meaning.

Juggling the words around improves the headline’s readability: “‘Cage-free’ and ‘fertile’: What egg labels mean.”

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Click here for Write It Well’s list of nine quick ways to make your headlines stronger.

Our book Professional Writing Skills shows you how to maintain parallel style, use verbs skillfully, and write concisely. All these skills are necessary to craft effective headlines.

Too busy to make sure your writing is engaging and easy to follow? Hire Write It Well to copyedit your documents. We’ll make sure your writing is clear and concise so that it makes the best possible impression of your organization.

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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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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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Journalists sometimes single out words to use in sloppy, repetitive ways. The term kabuki theater is becoming an example.

One writer notes that lately, pundits from respected news outlets have used the term as a lazy way to refer to empty political theatrics. The following list with parallel structure explains why journalists may have turned to this traditional Japanese theater term to make fun of U.S. politicians:

1) It sounds funny.
2) It sounds childish.
3) It sounds foreign.
4) It sounds incomprehensible.

– Jon Lackman, “It’s Time To Retire Kabuki:

The word doesn’t mean what pundits think it does,” Slate, April 14, 2010

Lackman’s parallel sequence of adjectives picks up momentum through the grammatical symmetry across these four sentences. Gramatically parallel lists like these are often a good way to add impact when you  lay out your own lines of reasoning.

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For more guidelines on parallel structure in sentences and lists, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide. Also look for our book Essential Grammar: A Write It Well Guide, which will ship later this summer!

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Skillful writers can make grammar downright alluring:

“Rare beauty and stunning self-possession … propelled Grace Kelly into the Hollywood pantheon, onto the Best-Dressed List, and ultimately to Monaco’s royal palace …. As London’s Victoria and Albert Museum unveils an exhibition devoted to Kelly’s style, … the author looks at the intertwined qualities of an icon: white-gloved ingénue, elegant goddess, passionate—and frankly sexual—romantic.”

– Laura Jacobs, Vanity Fair, May 2010

These sentences contain a lot of information, but parallel grammar makes them easy to follow. In the first sentence, the author uses prepositions to guide the reader through three aspects of Grace Kelly’s life:

“into the Hollywood pantheon, onto the Best-Dressed List, and ultimately to Monaco’s royal palace.”

In this last sentence, the author pairs a series of adjectives (in orange) with nouns (underlined):

“the intertwined qualities of an icon: white-gloved ingénue, elegant goddess, passionate—and frankly sexual—romantic.”

It pays to think about grammar whenever you write out a list of things or ideas. Parallel grammar keeps your sentences energetic and streamlined, and helps you project a professional image.

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For more guidelines on parallel structure in sentences and lists, see our updated book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide. Also look for our book Essential Grammar: A Write It Well Guide, which will ship later this summer!

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