In seven seconds you can butter two slices of bread. You can do five push-ups. You can make your bed. You can tie your shoes. Seven seconds. That’s all the time you have to grab the reader, listener or watcher’s attention when it comes to your content. Whether you’re making a video, drafting an email,
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I have bad news for you: your content will never be perfect. It can be excellent. It can better than all of your competitors’ content. It will never be perfect. Why? Because first, writing is a craft, not a science – you can tinker with something almost indefinitely, and you will always be able to
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So, you need a report written, and you approach a #writer with a table of contents. Don’t expect to get a useful cost estimate out of them. A table of contents is a good starting point, a kind of skeleton to hang everything on, but you need to add some meat to that framework to
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I received a speech for review the other day, with the customary acknowledgment of all the dignitaries present at the beginning of the sppech, followed by that phrase you hear so often in South African speeches: “All protocols observed.” Here’s why you shouldn’t be using it. It’s become customary to use this phrase in South
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Here’s a style tip for content writers: step away from the capital letters. Capital letters have some fundamental uses – they mark the first word of a sentence, they’re for proper nouns and acronyms, and they are often used in the titles of books, plays, films and other works of art. They are *not* for
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One of the best ways to check your writing is to read it out loud. I realise your colleagues might not appreciate this technique if you work in an open-plan office, so you might need to step outside for a bit. But it’ll be worth it, I promise. If you run out of breath while
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“I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter: I didn’t have time to write a short one.” That quote, in slightly different permutations, has been variously attributed to Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and Blaise Pascale, among others. We can’t say for sure who said it, but we can say for sure that it holds great
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That’s the question you should be asking before you send out that press release. If you can’t answer that question, I guarantee most people won’t get past the first paragraph. Case in point – I was recently asked to review a release for a big multinational company. They’d had a report compiled about their progress
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Love it or hate it, email is a fundamental part of the way we communicate at work. Here are five ways to streamline your email writing. 1. Be purposeful. Knowing why you’re writing is almost more important than what you’re writing. Do you want to inform the recipient, persuade them of something, ask for something,
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So, you’ve decided your company needs a newsletter. You’d like to connect with your clients and customers, keep them updated about innovations or changes at your firm, and you think a newsletter would tick several of those boxes. I’ve worked with several companies on their newsletters, and we always run up against the same obstacles.
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