I’ve been trying to convince myself to learn the ins and out of Twitter. To be honest,
I just don’t get it yet. 140-character Tweets? How much can you accomplish with that? I know a lot of people swear by Twitter as a social marketing tool and it has a huge following. If you’re like me and want to know more about this fascinating phenomenon, chekc out “Why I Like Twitter and Others Don’t” over at Internet Marketing with Josh Spaulding.

If you blog, finding the right look can be an ongoing challenge. Fortunately, WordPress has a huge inventory of themes to choose from. In case nothing there appeals to you, the folks at Listropolis have put together “35 Free Premium Wordpress Themes You Probably Missed.”And if they don’t do it for you, visit Smashing Magazine’s 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

Although it might be a bit on the technical side, SEO Hosting’s “50 Simple Tips for Improving Your Website” provides some discussion points with your IT professional. If nothing else, it can make you sound like an expert when you ask questions.

Where do you start in designing or re-designing your logo? So many factors have to be taken into consideration, since it will become a huge part of your identity. Graphic designer Tanner Christiansen offers “45 Rules for Creating a Great Logo Design.”

Imagine boiling down a company or product brand into three or four memorable words. That’s exactly what slogan writers do for a living, and their hard work is often overlooked. Not at Ad Slogans, where the staff has put together a Hall of Fame for slogans.

Back when I was a fulltime journalist, a writing coach once said you should use “golden coins” as strategically placed nuggets – an anecdote, a statistic, a vivid image – to keep readers walking along the story path. Rather than putting all your good stuff in the beginning, a strategy many writers use, he suggested spacing the golden coins throughout the narrative to maintain interest.

While the golden coins theory is useful, it’s also helpful to remember the things that cause readers’ eyes to gloss over to the point of boredom. Here are eight guaranteed ways to lose your reader’s attention in a hurry:

Take Forever to Get to the Point. Don’t hem and haw in your writing. Say what you have to say and get out of the way. Too may propositions are killers: “In an effort to provide employees with more time for their families, I would like to suggest that we try a four-day work week.” ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Telling Readers What They Already Know. Here’s an annoying way to begin a business letter, for example: “You wrote to us on June 4 asking for…”

Length. Closely related to the first point. No one wants to read more than they have to. Taking five paragraphs when three would do is a great way to lose interest.

Using technical terms. Imagine your reader having to stop every other sentence to figure out what your important-sounding acronym means or trying to decipher industry jargon.

Be Mysterious. Piquing interest is one thing. Being deliberately obscure is another. Make it clear from the start what you are writing about.

Using “I” A Lot. When you use the first person, it shows a sense of self-importance. Writing should be about the reader, not the writer.

Using “ing” Words. In addition to being generally wordy, using terms that end in “ing” frequently convey a feeling of uncertainty. “According to our phone conversation the other day, we are thinking about beginning…”

Saving the Best for Last. I’m all for concluding on a high note, but burying the lead is inexcusable.

Avoid these eight writing blunders, and your readers will make the journey from beginning to end with no interruptions.

Is this even physically possible? I’m not sure I can even type 400-500 words in 20 minutes. At least not without having to go back and spend 30 minutes fixing my typos.

Anyway, Jim offers eight tips for becoming a faster writer. His second tip suggests letting the idea incubate for a few days. I presume this also means doing a little research? Aren’t they both legitimate parts of the writing process?

Later on, Jim recommends getting away from writing by taking “a walk, cycle or run.” As every writer knows, this kind of procrastination is a critical part of the job. So is organizing your books by height, solving the cryptogram and contemplating how the Phillies lost a 6.5-game lead with 10 to play in 1964.

I subscribe to the Red Smith theory: “Writing is easy,” he once said. “You just open a vein and bleed.”

Sidebar: I had to Google Red Smith to get his exact quote. My search took me to Amazon.com, and a review of the book “Red Smith on Baseball.” I not only got the quote I was looking for, I bought the book.

Now that’s writing!

The point is writing is much more than what happens when fingers meet keyboard. Writing is an ongoing process, a lifestyle, a mindset. To boil it down to the 20 minutes spent in front of a computer screen is to demean the process.

What especially caught my attention was a quote from Rick Sherman, an Austin, Texas marketing consultant who defended his authorship of this description of his company: “[We’re] a market-leading provider of technology-enabled process-optimization tools to reduce and right-size inventory, improve forecast accuracy and service, optimize production resources, and reduce cycle time across the supply chain.”

Boiled down to its essence, the company makes money for its clients by making them more efficient. Of course, that’s not sexy enough for upper management, so Sherman penned his wordy, obtuse, self-important sounding passage. And, as Burling reported, he was more than happy to stand behind his work by arguing his target readers were supply-chain managers and trade-press writers, not reporters for daily newspapers. As if that audience is somehow genetically predisposed to prefer vague, unnecessarily complicated writing.

“It is not our strategic intent for you to understand,” he told Burling.

Sherman also defended the passage by saying it was purposely wordy to allow for as many key Internet search words as possible.

Kudos to Sherman for at least grasping the concept of writing for your audience and his rudimentary knowledge of Search Engine Optimization. But major jeers for thinking that you can sacrifice clarity in favor of keywords.

When that happens, a little bit of my credibility dies. My excuse is that I never learned how to touch type. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

But there are people out there who really don’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re” or “their” and “there” and “they’re.” In an effort to sound conversational, they write “I should of…” Worse, they leave their modifiers dangling. In public, no less.

In an earlier post, I suggested that writers should not be afraid to break the sometimes antiquated rules of grammar in favor of clear communication. I still believe that. What I’m talking about here are sloppy, careless, silly mistakes that strike a blow against your expertise.

Here are six common mistakes to look for before someone else sees your copy. The first four are homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings).

Your vs. You’re

I’d like to think people know the difference between the possessive pronoun (your) and the contraction for you are (you’re).

Its vs It’s

Again, it’s the difference between a possessive pronoun (its) and a contraction (it is).

There vs. Their vs. They’re

“There” can be used to reference a physical place, or as a pronoun. “Their” is another possessive pronoun. “They’re” is a contraction for “they are.”

Affect vs. Effect

This is a tough one that catches many people. “Affect” is a verb, as in “Your ability to write clearly will affect your income.” “Effect” is a noun, as in “The effect of not writing clearly will be a reduction in income.”

Should of, Could of, Would of

The loser’s lament: “coulda, woulda, shoulda.” Classic example of people writing the way they talk. In all three cases, “of” should be replaced by “have.”

The Dangling Participle

These are usually pretty funny. The juxtaposition of phrases can make for some hilarious scenarios. Here are a couple examples; the mistake should be obvious:

1. After rotting in the cellar for weeks, my brother brought up some oranges.
2. Featuring plug-in circuit boards, we can strongly endorse this server’s flexibility and growth potential.
3. Relieved of responsibilities at work, your home should be a place to relax.

The best way to avoid these embarrassing errors and keep your credibility intact is take a few moments to proofread your work carefully before exposing it to the world.

As a newspaper editor, I used to remind my reporters that there was a finite amount of space for their stories. If they could save one or two words per paragraph in a 20-inc story, it might mean the difference between having their work run intact or having vital information clipped out by a ruthless copy editor under deadline pressure.

Most reporters seemed to grasp the concept, especially as news holes began to shrink. They made a concerted effort to trim the fat out of every phrase.

Unfortunately, the message never made it to the world of business writing, where long, rambling reports seem to be a badge of honor for many middle managers. Why say it in three words when you can stretch it to five or six?

A word of advice to these budding scribes: be concise. Unnecessary words waste your reader’s time, can obscure your message and gobble up space that could be put to better use. Excess words are bumps and obstacles that block the smooth slide through a piece of writing.

Avoid redundancies, run-on sentences, wordy phrases, passive voice and unnecessary adjectives. These sloppy stylistic habits add little meaning to or clarify your message.

Take a look at a few phrases commonly found in business writing and how they can be tightened up:

By fourth grade in my Catholic grade school, the good nuns had drilled into my head all the parts of speech, the punctuation rules and grammar regulations that were never to be broken, lest they show up on my permanent record. We diagrammed long, rambling sentences, marking the nouns with one red line and the verbs with two, adjectives with a diagonal and adverbs with a squiggly mark. By the time we were done, our diagrams looked like schematics for the Space Shuttle.

At the risk of getting a rap on the knuckles, I’m here to tell you to forget all those rules.

Writing is about communicating. It’s about making the reader feel comfortable with your words, about setting a friendly tone, about being clear and concise. It’s not about blindly following archaic rules that can get in the way of effective communication.

Here are a couple of rules I’m giving you permission to break without fear of an icy glare from the nun in the front of the room:

Ending Sentences with a Preposition. A big no-no, right? No matter how convoluted a sentence might get, we were warned that ending a sentence with a preposition might lead to the end of life as we know it. Well, modern linguists say a preposition is perfectly acceptable to end a sentence with. For example, “Depending on foreign oil is something we want to get rid of” sounds a whole lot better than “Depending on foreign oil is something of which we want to get rid.”

Using Sentence Fragments. Ho boy, did we used to get in trouble for these. In quiet times, I still hear a screeching voice in my head: “Every sentence has to have a predicate.”

Or not.

Sentence fragments can be used for dramatic effect. And to add rhythm. But only sparingly. Used too often, sentence fragments can make your writing sound choppy and clipped.

Starting Sentences with a Conjunction. I once had to stay after school for using a conjunction to start a sentence. And that wasn’t the worst of it. I had to wash dinner dishes at the convent. Or I could have taken out their trash. But the real punishment was when I had to go home and tell my mother. For me to do that was difficult.

See, it’s not that difficult.

Using One-Sentence Paragraphs. We were told a paragraph had to contain a complete thought. Well, who ever said you can’t have a complete thought in one sentence?

Using one sentences paragraphs can provide a dramatic shift in rhythm for your reader. Paragraph after paragraph that contain sentence after sentence of the same construction can lull your reader to sleep. Writing should be varied to keep the reader interested and awake.

That’s where one sentence paragraphs can help.

The fact is simple words communicate better than big words. Some writers feed their egos by using pompous language to impress their audiences. Using big words when simple ones will suffice can annoy and distract the reader from what you are trying to say. Some examples:

Use help rather than assist.

Use live rather than reside.

Use help rather than facilitate.

Use small rather than diminutive.

Use use rather than employ. or utilize.

Use get rather than obtain or procure.

Use best rather than optimum.

Use buy rather than purchase.

Go back and re-read your latest piece of copy. I’ll bet there are at least a handful of instances where you can substitute a simple word and see a huge increase in the readability of your writing.

Use one of the “est” words in your headline.

Oldest, newest, fastest, slowest, tallest, shortest, longest, fattest, skinniest, deepest, heaviest, lightest, thickest, thinest, smallest, largest, earliest, latest, messiest, neatest.

The “est” list goes on and one. First and last work pretty well, too.

Reporters and editors like to think in terms of extremes. They usually make for good stories. Use that to your advantage. Work one of those words into your next news release headline and I can practically guarantee you the easiest placement you’ve ever had.

When it comes to good writing, however, I find a lot of business people would rather do it themselves than pay someone to do it right. They think they can string together a few words to make a sentence and a few sentences to make a paragraph. Put a couple of paragraphs together and pretty soon they have a document. What could be easier?

It doesn’t matter if it has grammar and punctuation problems. It doesn’t matter if it’s rambling and unfocused. It doesn’t matter if its full of jargon and technical concepts.

Does it work? Does it get their message across? Does it motivate anyone to act?

Probably not.

If I tried to fix my own roof, I guarantee it would leak. If I tried to fix my car, it would break down right away. If I tried to fix my refrigerator, I’d be tossing out a lot of spoiled food.

Why is the business world such a safe haven for horrible writing? From memos and reports to sales letters, press releases, web content, brochures and newsletters, authors get away with linguistic transgressions that would not have been tolerated by my eighth-grade composition teacher.

I’m talking about putting a value on clear, concise, compelling language. I’m talking about knowing the difference between “its” and “it’s” and “they’re” and “their” and “there.” I’m talking about knowing your audience and conveying a message.

Good business writing can boost a company’s profitability and reputation, yet many organizations are unwilling to leave it to a professional. Why is that?