If you’ve ever looked at all the things you need to do to become a better communicator…and panicked…then, this is for you.

You had great intentions.

You were going to improve your business writing skills. So you checked out some relevant websites, dipped into a few books, and maybe even started reading blogs like this one. At first, you loved it. The tips were helpful. The advice made sense. But the more you read, the more you realized how much there was to learn. Originally, all you wanted to do was figure out how to hit a ball with a stick. But now, you’re worrying about the angle of your fingers, strength of your grip, cock of your wrists, direction of your shoulders, bend of your waist, line of your back, placement of your feet, torque of your hips, height of your windup, acceleration of your swing, and angle of your follow through. Now, nothing seems right.

Stop, take a deep breath, and do what the pros do.

Before you tie yourself into any more knots, stop, and focus on the fundamentals. That’s what the pros do. Great communicators stick to the basics and execute them better than anyone. Sure, they try new ideas and pick up fresh tips. They learn all kinds of arcane facts about their game and may even give it their own personal twist. But they never let this distract them from the core fundamentals. Never.

What are the fundamentals for everyday business writing?

When I’m working on a new document – any kind of business document – I’m always thinking about three things: how can I (1) get attention, (2) get understood, and (3) get a response. These three points may sound simplistic, but they’re right up there with, “Relax, keep your eye on the ball, and remember to follow through.” They apply to every business communicator in every situation. Here’s how I tackle them:

1. Get attention – Your document has to say, “read me.”

Everything starts with the reader, and you should assume that yours is in a hurry. He’s busy. He glances at your document. You’ve got to catch his attention. To do this, you have three tools at your disposal:

• Your headline (or title or subject line) – Is it personal or newsworthy or helpful or unexpected? Your headline should say, “Hey, look at this…here’s something that’s interesting or important or both.
• Your first few sentences – Most people believe that your first few sentences should summarize your document. I’m fine with that. But your introduction must also do something even more important. It must give your reader a reason to read the rest of your document. Always ask yourself, “Do the first few sentences make me want to read more?”
• The overall look of the page – At a glance, does your page seem easy to read? Is it simple to scan – with headlines, subheads, short paragraphs and bullet points? Or is it one, long uninviting paragraph after another.

2. Get understood – Your thoughts need to be very clear and orderly.

Business writing doesn’t have to be impressive. It just has to be clear, simple, logical, and easy to understand. So, explain yourself. Be conversational. And organize your thoughts carefully. If it helps, number your points or list everything in a Q&A format. Do whatever it takes to make your message clear, clear, clear.

The key to getting understood is to organize your thoughts the way you clean out a closet. Dump all your thoughts onto the page. Throw away the junk. Organize what’s left. Box it into paragraphs and label it with headlines and subheads. Stack it in a logical, sensible order. I’m convinced that clear writing is really about clear thinking – in other words, organize your thoughts so your reader doesn’t have to.

3. Get a response – You must tell the reader what to do next.

Never forget that the purpose of business communication is to get something done. You want someone to buy a product, attend a meeting, answer your question, make an introduction, understand your point of view, or take some other action. Don’t hint at this. Don’t assume your readers will do the right thing. Ask them very specifically and very politely to act.

Even if you’re simply providing information or an update, you can include a call to action, “Make sure you take this into consideration.” Or, “Let me know if this all makes sense to you,” or “Please contact me if you have any questions about this.”

Are these the only three fundamentals? Of course not. But they’re the big ones.

Get attention. Get understood. Get a response. If you never learn anything else, you’ll improve your business writing just by aiming for these three goals. By all means, look for other writing tips, too. Collect as many as you can. Try them out. See what sticks. But always come back to the fundamentals. Life is too short to memorize 25,376 writing tips. So stay focused on the big ones.

Make mistakes. Make a lot of them. And make them often. It’s the only way to get your thoughts on paper, and you’ll enjoy the writing process more. I actually damaged some muscles in my hands several years ago, because I was so excited about something I was writing that I spent too many hours pounding the keyboard too hard. Fortunately, my hands recovered after an extended writing break (as in months, not days), but I’m still convinced that the best way to write is with enthusiastic, mistake-laden abandon. Here’s why.

Uptight writers are the worst kind. I know. I’ve been one.

Uptight writers don’t make mistakes. They censor and filter every thought long before it gets out of their head and onto the page. They’re too careful, too cautious. In sports, this is called “playing not to lose.” And it rarely breeds champions.

I almost got fired from my job as a junior advertising copywriter because I was such an uptight writer. I was working overseas, writing in a language I barely understood (British English). It was my first real job. I wanted to do well. And I got yelled at a lot. Fortunately, the story had a very happy ending. Along the way, I learned how to get more mistakes into my copywriting, and it made me a better writer.

So how can you learn to make more mistakes?

Simple. Save the editing for after the writing. If you edit your thoughts before you get them down on paper – or onto your computer – you’ll squeeze the life out of your message. You may even choke it off completely. Don’t just sit there, staring at your blank page, struggling to come up with the perfect opening. If you do, nothing will seem good enough. Instead, start writing. Write anything. Write something that you don’t even like that much. Write something full of half-baked ideas, awkward wording, and other mistakes.

In other words, write the way you clean out a closet.

How do you clean out a closet? You fling open the door, dump everything on the floor, and start sorting stuff into piles. Writing is the same. You start the process by dumping all your thoughts and ideas onto the page – then you begin to sort through them. You organize the ideas worth keeping and throw away the trash. You box and label your thoughts: grouping similar ideas together in paragraphs and sections, then labeling them with headings and subheads. If you write something you like, but don’t know where to put it, save it in your pile of scraps (to see Helpful advice on saving your scraps, click here).

For a short email, this whole closet-cleaning process only takes a few minutes. For a major presentation, it can take hours. No matter what you’re working on, this is a much faster, more productive way to write and write well.

What to do with your mistakes after you’ve made them.

Once you’ve made your mistakes, get rid of them. The best mistakes are the ones you made early in the writing process. Making them helped get your writing going. Now that you’ve got all your ideas down and your document is taking shape, you can afford to be a perfectionist. Proofread carefully. Do it again. Then get someone else to proofread your document. After all, the good mistakes are the ones you make while trying to get your thoughts on paper – not the ones that slip through to your final draft.

Grammar is great. You should learn the basics of good grammar and stick to them.  It’s not that hard. Just remember that grammar is supposed to add clarity to your communication. Not confusion. So if it comes to a choice between clear communication and “correct” communication, always choose clarity – even if you have to break a grammar rule now and then. Here are three rules that are very breakable. I’ll explain why.

1. Feel free to boldly split infinitives.

Infinitives are action words with a to in front of them. To dance. To write. To listen. To go. Word nerds used to teach that, to be grammatically correct, you should never insert a word between the to and the verb after it. Some still believe this. Gene Roddenberry wasn’t convinced. His Star Trek series immortalized the most famous split infinitive of all: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” And his split infinitive was absolutely acceptable. Over a decade ago, the New Oxford Dictionary of English declared the no split infinitives rule to be a fallacy.

So where did the spilt infinitives myth start? It all goes back to classical Latin. In Latin, an infinitive is one word, not two (e.g., the Latin word meaning to write is scribere), so it’s impossible to split a Latin infinitive. Grammar gurus back in the 1700s decided that, if Latin infinitives couldn’t be split, then English ones shouldn’t be. Now we know better.

2. Ending a sentence with a preposition is nothing to worry about.

Prepositions are words such as about, in, at, over, by, under, for, through, or between. They tell you the position of one thing in relation to another. “The phone is on the table.” The meeting ends at noon. Now you can see why prepositions are called prepositions – they’re in the “pre-position” of their object; they come before it.

In English, however, a preposition can sit all alone at the end of a sentence with no word coming after it. For example, “Next time you’re in the area, feel free to stop by.” It’s perfectly okay to the end the sentence with by. I suppose you could even end your sentence with two prepositions, “Feel free to boldly stop by, where no man has stopped by before.“

So, where did people get the idea that you couldn’t end a sentence with a preposition? You guessed it. Latin. For reasons that would take too long to explain, the preposition thing is important in Latin. And since academics of old considered Latin to be the ideal language, they thought the same rule should apply to English. They were wrong.

There is, however, one thing you should know before you start slinging prepositions all over the place. Never use a preposition if it isn’t needed. For example, “Where’s the meeting at?” The at is completely unnecessary. The sentence would be much cleaner and just as meaningful if it simply asked, “Where’s the meeting?” If you don’t need a preposition, take it out.

3. Is it even okay to use sentence fragments? Yes.

It’s even acceptable to use the occasional sentence fragment. Like this one. You just don’t want to overdo it. A real sentence is a complete thought with a subject and a verb. “Dogs bark.” That’s a sentence. Fragments are pieces of sentences. “Woof!” Fragments are used to answer questions or to add emphasis. They work best when they’re conversational and natural. I like them, because they break up the rhythm of your writing and can provide relief after a long, wordy sentence.

Finally, just remember that your grammar and style should always fit the occasion. Suits and ties for weddings. T-shirts and shorts for a day at the lake. Classical grammar for formal proposals. Jazz for advertising copy. Overall, the best business writing is both professional and conversational. So, stick to the fundamentals of good grammar, but make sure your wording is easy on the ear.

It’s a dark art. Most of us learned it first as schoolchildren and then perfected it later as college freshmen. We did it because the teacher asked for a three-page paper, but we only had two pages worth of meaningful thoughts. So we blathered on about nothing, repeating ourselves…rambling…struggling to reach the bottom of page three. Along the way, we learned how to write extra words just to fill space. It got us through school. But it’s killing our business communications. And it raises a very important question….

If you’re not being paid by the word, why add extra ones?

Why use 50 words when five will do? You’ve probably done it for at least one of the following reasons. I’ve done it for all them.

• To impress the boss – or the client, or that guy in your department who’s gunning for your job. You think bigger documents make bigger impressions. But what happens when your reader realizes all the extra weight is fat and not muscle?
• To meet expectations – everyone is expecting a 10-page report, so that’s exactly what you give them. You figure it’s easier to grind out the 10 pages than explain why you only wrote seven.
• To hide a lack of knowledge – you’ve been asked to comment on something you don’t understand. You try to look intelligent and rabbit on about who-knows-what. Politicians have this down to a science. Don’t do it – especially in writing. It’s boring. It’s inauthentic. And it shows.
• To cover every eventuality – your readers don’t really need to know every conceivable detail that might possibly have something to do with your message. They simply want enough details to make an informed decision and take action.
• To quit work early – yes, it can be easier to write a long document than a short one. Shorter documents require more care and feeding. You have to craft and edit them more extensively. You face all those painful decisions about what to leave in and what to take out. But the effort is always worth it. The more work you put into writing your document, the less work it is for your readers.

But is shorter really better?

Absolutely. Here are three short reasons why.

• Shorter gets read first. A stack of documents land on your desk. Most are long. One is short. Which would you read first?
• Shorter gets read completely. Everyone gets the whole message. No one resents having to read it.
• Shorter gets a response. When all the overgrowth is cut back, the main message is easier to see. Your readers get your point and can act on it quickly.

Shorter is better. Just remember that shorter is also relative. A 45-page document is wonderfully short if it originally started life as a 70-pager.

Okay, but what about your team’s expectations?

You need to set the expectations yourself. Before you show up at tomorrow’s meeting with your newly slimmed-down document, make sure your team knows what to expect. Tell the boss that it’s going to be a crisper, shorter report this time. Warn fellow presenters that you’re cutting the PowerPoint from 40 dull slides to 20 sharp ones. Give the marketing department a heads-up that your next white paper will take less paper, but pack more punch.

So what does it take to write shorter documents? 

All it really takes is courage. Stop stockpiling words. Buck up, be a hero, and cut your text. Do it now. Organize your thoughts and eliminate the fluff. Your readers will love you for it. And your English teacher will never know.

A number of years ago, I created some TV spots for a major metro newspaper. The idea was to showcase some of the paper’s better-known writers and offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their world. Instead of scripting the ads ahead of time, I would stand behind the cameraman and interview each journalist. Then we would cut the footage together and, effectively, write the TV commercials after they had already been shot. Since I like to know what makes other writers tick, the project was a blast. But the most interesting moment of all came with a comment from the paper’s film critic.

I had asked her about the hardest part of her job.

To get the conversation going, I had asked her what she loved about her job and what were the tough parts. She said something that has stuck with me ever since. She said the hard part about being a movie critic is knowing that it can take someone just as much effort to create a bad film as it does to create a good one. The movie may have been a dud, but a lot of people worked incredibly hard to produce it.

The same is true for business writing.

You can put tremendous effort into writing your next presentation, proposal, report, or other document. But effort alone is no guarantee of success. We’ve all read documents that were painstakingly created, but still missed the main point. Sure, they may have been grammatically and factually correct, but they were also unbearably confusing…or boring…or both.

So if time and energy don’t ensure better writing, what does?

Business writing is a craft. It’s not complicated, but there are best practices you need to follow. We talk about these all the time at 3000messages. Stick to them, and you’ll see better results. To improve your writing, remember these three things:

• Pay attention to good writing whenever you come across it – if you read something that works well, pause for a minute and ask yourself what makes it work. What is it about the structure or style that makes it a good read? Not only will you pick up some great tips and ideas, but you’ll also get in the habit of noticing what works and what doesn’t.
• Learn or review a writing tip each week – the easiest way to become a better writer is to learn a little each week. (That’s why we created this blog. If you haven’t already signed up for email notifications of our new posts, click here.)
• Practice little and often – when you learn a new writing tip, try using it in the very next document you write. It’s the doing that makes the learning stick.

Write smarter, not harder.

If you follow these principles, will all your documents be perfect? Of course not. No one bats 1000. But once you know what to look for, you can make your communications much, much stronger without having to put in a lot more effort. After all, it can take just as much work to create a bad document as a good one.

Suddenly, America is taking a fresh look at one of its great communicators, Julia Child. And love is in the air. Her magnum opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, has rocketed to dizzying new heights atop other New York Times bestsellers. Health-crazed, 21st century Americans are now secretly slipping into rich crème sauces and pounds of butter. Julia is again changing the way a generation thinks about food. She is getting away with it because she was such a wonderful communicator. Julia Child knew how to write, and my dear daughter-in-law thinks she knows why.

Julia’s first job was as an advertising copywriter.
This explains everything.

Last week, my daughter-in-law sent a tweet to let me know that Julia Child had started her career the same way I started mine, as an advertising copywriter. After finishing college in 1935, Julia’s first job was writing ad copy for W. & J. Sloane, a high-end Manhattan furniture store.

She must have been good at it, because when she finally announced her plans to resign, her boss tried to stop her with the promise that “In two years, I can make you the biggest woman in advertising in New York City!“  Her response was classic Julia Child. At 6’2”, this former college basketball player confided in her diary that she was already the biggest woman in advertising. Today, when I read her Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I see all the signs of a master copywriter at work.

Whether or not Julia taught you to cook, if you follow
her principles, she will teach you to write.

If you look carefully into Julia’s how-to masterpiece, you’ll see a copywriter’s best practices at work. These are practices you can easily apply to your own, everyday business communications. Here are three of the most important:

1. Aim for the call to action.

The most successful advertising copywriters are incredibly single-minded. Unlike other writers, their ultimate goal is not to entertain or even to inform – though they must do both and do them well. Their one goal is to provoke action. They must persuade their readers to buy a product, support a cause, or believe in a brand. It’s all about the call to action: find out more…call today…order now.

Julia Child understood this implicitly. Her book, TV shows, and in a sense, her whole life could be summed up as one very focused, very direct call to action: learn to cook well and love it. Roast the duck. Sauté the mushrooms. Stir the sauce. Just do it.

In your own business communications, whether you’re sending a quick email or a lengthy proposal, you must keep the end in mind…and the end is always a call to action. Too many businesspeople forget this. Think about what you’re asking your readers to do. Don’t just assume they will do it. Ask them to do it. Give them the next step. Be specific. If you don’t ask, they won’t act.

2. Assume absolutely nothing.

Julia Child never assumed that her readers understood a thing about cooking, French or otherwise. She explained everything. Patiently. Carefully. There were diagrams, descriptions, and definitions. This was not a case of talking down to her readers. Quite the opposite. Like any good copywriter, Julia respected her readers enough to take the time to give them careful, thoughtful explanations.

What about your readers? Do they really understand all your industry jargon and technical terms? Have you given them the rationale behind your recommendations? Are you anticipating and answering their questions? What if they weren’t in the meeting where everything was discussed and the decision made? Don’t just tell your readers to blanche the almonds. Tell them why, when, and how to do it.

3. Break it down, step by step.

Julia made the complicated simple. She demystified French cooking for post-war America by translating haute cuisine into a step-by-step action plan that any reader could follow. Sure, the book stretched to some 700 pages. But it was so well organized and wonderfully accessible that it never felt daunting.

Whatever you’re writing, think of it as an instruction manual. Copywriters do. Especially with long brochures, white papers, and websites, good copywriters are always looking for ways to break complicated messages into simple steps. So think in bullet points. Label your steps: 1, 2, 3. Turn longwinded copy into short, sharp paragraphs. Use subheads. Create simple comparison charts. And keep your writing relaxed and conversational.

Since you’ve got to start somewhere, start here and now.

With each of your documents from here on: (1) always aim for a call to action, (2) never assume your readers know what you’re talking about, and (3) break down your information, step-by-step. Do this today. Do it with the very next document you have to write – and you will be well on your way to learning the art that Julia Child mastered long before she mastered the art of French cooking.

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 long enough for me to marry a lovely English rose, begin my professional life as writer, and become nearly fluent in a second language (British English). But the experience completely wrecked my spelling.

On losing my ability to spell.

Working as an advertising copywriter in an English ad agency, I had to learn British spelling and grammar. When I finally moved back to the States with my lovely English rose, the spelling troubles began in earnest. Now I was an American, working for an American ad agency, but writing like an Englishman. I couldn’t remember which words and usages were British and which were American. Sure, the obvious ones were easy: center is American…centre is British. But to this day, I still get hopelessly confused over spellings such as traveling and travelling. (If you’re wondering, one “l” is American, and two are British – I just looked it up.)

All this transatlantic confusion has given me heartfelt compassion for anyone who struggles with words that sound the same, but mean different things. One of the most frustrating examples for most people is affect and effect. So, I thought I should give you an easy way to remember which is which.

Affect or effect? Which should it be?

To figure out when to use affect and when to use effect, all you have to do is remember these two phrases: “Affect acts,” and “Effect ends.”

Affect acts.
Affect is an action word…a verb. It does stuff. It makes an impact. It acts. Here’s an example: “The new hiring freeze affects every department in our company.”

Effect ends.
Effect is a thing…a noun. It usually means the end result. “We’re already seeing the effects of the new hiring freeze in our department?”

So, affect acts, and effect ends.
Make sense? Here’s another example:

The new design will affect production.
(The new design will do something…it will act.)

Faster production will be the effect of the new design.
(Faster production is the effect of the new design…it’s the end, the result.)

That’s it. Affect acts, and effect is the end result. The aa and ee make this easy to remember. Here’s one more example so you can make sure you’ve got it:

Your suggestion is affecting sales positively.
(The suggestion is acting…it’s doing something. It’s affecting sales.)

Your suggestion is having a positive effect on sales.
(What’s the end result of the suggestion? A good effect.)

Are there any exceptions to this rule?
Sadly, yes, there are exceptions to everything. However, with affect and effect, the exceptions are fairly rare. I’ll explain them here for those of you who really want to know. But if you have something more important to do, you can stop reading now. Thanks and goodbye.

Now, for anyone still reading, here are the two main exceptions:

1. Effect can sometimes be used as a verb. In business writing, the one example you run into most often is the phrase, to effect change. “The new manager effected major changes in our department.” In business writing, if effect is used as a verb, it’s almost always paired together with the word change.
2. And yes, affect can be used as a noun, but only if you’re a psychologist talking about your client’s display of emotions. “Her inappropriate affect worried the doctor.”

This is really is all you need to know about affect and effect for everyday business writing. I hope these tips will have a positive affect effect on your future writing.

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 it. Instead, I just cut it out and paste it into my list of scraps at the end of the document. If I change my mind later, I can always put it back in the document. What kinds of content usually end up in my bucket of scraps? Great question.

This isn’t going to pretty, but maybe you can learn from my mistakes.

Okay, this is a little like airing my dirty laundry, because most of the writing that ends up in my scrap heap isn’t very pretty. Nevertheless, here goes…here are the four main types of writing that I have to cut from my documents and toss in the scrap bucket:

1. Repetitive statements – Usually I don’t notice this at first. But when I’m reading back through a rough draft, I start to realize that I’ve said the same thing one time too many. Admittedly, a little repetition can be helpful for your reader. It reinforces key messages and makes them more memorable. But don’t overdo it. Your reader hasn’t got all day. Make your point and move on.

2. Too cute, too clever copy – I’ve written fluff that I thought was absolutely brilliant, only to read it the next day and realize that I was trying to show off instead of trying to serve my readers. I was striving too hard to be funny, or smart, or insightful. Instead, I should have been straightforward, simple, and helpful. Your writing can be personal without your trying to draw attention to yourself. Bottom line? If you write something to impress your reader, it almost always turns out to be junk. Throw it away before you embarrass yourself.

3. Complicated details – Often, I’ll write an explanation or description of something that is technically correct, but it just feels a little complicated. In my heart of hearts, I know I had trouble explaining it. However, the great temptation is to rationalize and leave it in my document anyway, because, after all, it is accurate. Don’t kid yourself. If a certain section seems slightly complicated or convoluted to you, it will be even more so to your readers. Be honest. Get out the knife. Cut the section. And find a more simple, straightforward way to explain what you mean.

4. Irrelevant information – Sometimes you’re reading a document, and all of a sudden you come across a passage that leaves you wondering, “Why did he put this here?” He put it there because he didn’t have the courage to scrap it. A paragraph may be incredibly interesting and beautifully written, but if it’s off topic, leave it out. Everything in your document should support your key message. (By the way, irrelevant information is the good kind of scrap. It often becomes the seed idea for a whole new writing project.)

What else should be scrapped?

Long, flowery descriptions. Gossip. Jargon. Personal criticism. Sloppy writing. Information that you think must surely be true, even though you haven’t taken the trouble to find out for yourself. Come to think of it, these kinds of things aren’t even worthy of your scraps bucket; they should simply be deleted.

Well, now you know what’s in my bucket of scraps. But what’s in yours?

What kinds of content do you find yourself cutting out of your documents? How do you make the tough calls about what to keep and what to cut? I’d love to hear back from you.

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 a way to make decision-making easier, and it has sped up my writing ever since.

Create a bucket for scraps at the end of your document.

This is so simple. When I start work on a new document, I draw a big line at the end of the document (like this: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) and label it “SCRAPS”. Then, if there’s something in the document that I’m not sure I like, I just cut it out and paste it into the scraps section. This is much, much easier than deleting text. Why? Because it totally eliminates the worry that I’m going to cut out some sentence or paragraph today and regret it tomorrow.

This has done more than anything to make me a decisive editor.

The scraps bucket works like a charm. Once you’ve got that bucket at the bottom of your page, you suddenly become a ruthless editor of your own writing. You can happily cut, chop, and hack away at your precious sentences without feeling the slightest twinge of remorse. That’s because you’ve tricked yourself into believing that you’re never actually deleting anything – you’re just temporarily moving it from the body of your document to your scraps pile for re-use later.

The biggest surprise in my bucket of scraps.

The real surprise in this whole thing is that once something goes into my scraps section, it almost never comes out. Normally, when I put something in scraps, I think it’s a brilliant sentence that I must use in my document as soon as I find the right place for it. In practice, this almost never happens. When I finally finish editing the document, I delete the scraps section altogether.

What kind of stuff goes into my scraps section?

Great question. I’m going to tackle this in my next blog post, so check back for it. It will help you think about what to look for when cutting the fluff out of your documents. Meanwhile, I’m going to let you take a peak behind the scenes of my own writing efforts by leaving in my scrap section for this article. See below.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX S C R A P S XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

When I was writing this post, I thought it might be interesting to talk about how directors often use their “scraps” (scenes that land on the cutting room floor) to create a “director’s cut”, their own version of a film or TV spot. It seemed like a clever idea. But after I wrote it, I didn’t like it. So it landed on the scrap heap. Here it is:

When I work with directors of TV spots, they often put together a director’s cut of the commercial we’re creating. It’s their chance to go back and edit the commercial to make it the way they would like it if not bound to a strict 30-second time limit. They’ve got all this beautiful footage on the cutting room floor and they want to use it. So they create a version, just for themselves, that’s usually a little longer than the actual TV commercial, but is also funnier or more beautiful or more edgy or something.

Well, I suppose you could take your writing scraps and make a director’s cut of your document: you would have a special version just for you with all the eloquent phrases and wonderful insights that didn’t quite make it into your document. But then again, you probably wouldn’t want to use it.

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.

Writing is hard work, and getting started is often the hardest part of all. If you feel like you absolutely have to begin writing your document at the very beginning, you’re going to make it even tougher on yourself. When you’re facing a new writing project, whether it’s a one-page letter or a 20-page report, the most important thing you can do is quickly get some words on the page. Any words. Anywhere.

It’s like walking into a meeting with a group of strangers. If you sit in silence while everyone else is talking, it gets harder and harder to break in with your comments. If you say something at the beginning of the meeting, you’ve broken your personal silence barrier, and it’s easier to engage in conversation. The same thing happens when you’re writing. The longer you sit there staring at a blank page, trying to think of the perfect opening, the harder it is to write anything at all. But as soon as you break the silence barrier and get some words on that page, the rest of your thoughts flow more freely.

So, to get started, write the easiest part first. Maybe it’s just a bullet list of product features. Maybe it’s the call to action at the end of the page, asking people to come to your next event. Often, it’s a section of simple facts that will end up as a paragraph somewhere in the middle of your document. And yes, sometimes it might even be the opening paragraph. The important thing is that you start where you can – as soon as you can.