While working on his masterpiece Ulysses, the novelist James Joyce ran into a friend who asked him how the writing was going. Joyce responded that he’d been working all day and had produced only 2 sentences. The friend asked, “You have been seeking the right words?” “No,” said Joyce. “I have the words already. What [...]
Whether you’re dashing off an informal email to coordinate a meeting, developing a proposal, or compiling a monthly status report to the executive team, your writing represents an investment of time. If you’re like most employees responding to our surveys in client organizations, you spend 20-90 percent of your workday writing. Your organization expects a [...]
A new year means new budgets for your clients and prospects and new opportunities to propose your services and products. You may find yourself offering a proposal in one of two situations: 1) You send an unsolicited proposal to persuade the reader he or she needs your product or service; or 2) The reader is [...]
Grammar and clarity are inseparable. Grammatical mistakes can either muddy your message or mar your image. —TEN— Pronouns after than: “He’s taller than me.” Finish the sentence to hear the correct choice after than or as. Correct: “He’s taller than I [am tall].” —NINE— Irregular verb go: “They had went to the store.” Gone is [...]
With the advent of smart phones, social media, and texting, we’re writing more—not less—than five years ago. And more people write more. We used to pick up the phone for day-to-day tasks. But so many people screen their calls with voicemail that we’ve found it faster and easier to get through by writing than calling. [...]
Rarely do I finish a speaking or training engagement that someone doesn’t ask me some version of this question: “What’s involved in writing a book? How hard is it to get published?” My answer: It depends. Anybody can write a book these days. Almost 3 million titles were published last year alone (includes self-published books). [...]
Having taught business and technical writing for 3 decades in almost half the Fortune 500 corporations, I’ve literally been reading your mail. Well, okay, maybe not YOUR mail. But I’ve read and discussed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of emails, letters, proposals, and reports with both writers and recipients to discover their intentions and [...]
“All your people write long narratives that we have to wade through! We’d have our writing problems licked if we could just get them to jot things down simply in bullet points,” the president snapped at his partner. “Everything can’t be boiled down to bullet points,” the older partner and chairman of the board responded. [...]
“I’m tired of going to court because these lawyers don’t know how to use a which clause or where to put a comma.” A vice president and general counsel of a large oil company made that statement to me early in my career just as he was contracting my training company to lead business writing [...]
What does your writing say about your personal brand or that of your company? For all the words you speak during the average day, my guess is that you write with far less confidence—and often less fluently. Yet your business and your brand depend on what your writing can deliver: attention-grabbing emails and letters to [...]
