Monthly Archives: August 2009
The Affect Effect and how to get it right.
I completely empathize with anyone who struggles over the uses of affect and effect – words that sound the same, but aren’t. I gained my empathy for the spelling confused by traveling to England for a couple of weeks. The weeks turned into months and the months eventually added up to nine years. This was [...]
Posted in Grammar & Spelling 3 Comments
What kind of writing ends up in my bucket of scraps?
In my previous post (Helpful advice on saving your scraps.), I explained how I became a bolder, faster editor by creating a section for scraps at the end of my documents. If there’s a sentence or paragraph in my rough draft that doesn’t quite fit, I no longer fret over whether to keep or delete [...]
Posted in General Writing 5 Comments
Helpful advice on saving your scraps.
One of the all-time toughest choices for any business writer is deciding what to leave in your rough draft and what to take out. This vexed me for years. I would waste precious hours trying to decide whether a particular phrase, sentence, or paragraph should stay in my text or go. Finally, I figured out [...]
Posted in General Writing 4 Comments
Why you don’t have to write in straight lines.
A lot of people assume that good writers always start at the beginning of their documents and write straight through the whole thing until they reach the conclusion at the end. Not me. I start at the easiest place first. Sometimes it’s the beginning. But often it’s not. Here’s why.
Posted in General Writing 1 Comment
The easiest way to write a great one-pager.
You’ve got to put together a one-page description of your new project, event, product, or service. It needs to be very clear and easy to read. You don’t have a lot of time to work on this, so you’d be happier if it were also easy to write. No problem. All you have to do [...]
Posted in Communication Tips, General Writing 4 Comments
What’s wrong with him and I?
The I/me mix-up. You hear it a lot these days. People are in a hurry. They’re talking fast. So they mix up words like “I” and “me”. It’s easily done. But when it pops up in your writing, you’ve got a problem. Word mix-ups distract your readers. It’s like showing up at the office wearing [...]
Posted in Grammar & Spelling 1 Comment
How to write like Julia Child.