All Posts Tagged With: "writing"

Over at Copyblogger, Jim Estill recently boasted that he could write a 400-500 word article in 20 minutes.

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.

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I figure I’ve typed about a billion words – give or take a small novel — in my 30-year writing career. To this day, I still use the old hunt-and-peck method, which means my brain often gets ahead of my fingers. The result is some pretty embarrassing mistakes in my work. I usually catch them while proofing, but the occasional boo-boo does slip through.

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.

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(Third in a series of articles about improving your writing.)

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.

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(Second in a series of articles about improving your writing.)

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:

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I came across this post on the Online Publicity Journal. While I agree that the benefits of a well-written press release are considerable, I disagree that just about anyone can write one and be successful.

There are at least Nine Steps to An Effective Press Release including: understanding what news is and how to meet the media’s needs, developing a relationship with reporters and editors, timing, following up, etc. Even basic formatting, spelling, grammar and punctuation are crucial elements.

That said, I often tell prospective clients they have a choice: they can research the media and develop relationship, research background and statistics, write and draft a release, distribute it and follow up, then hope that the release is effective. Of course, they have to do all this while running the day-to-day operations of their business.

Or they can leave it to a pro.

Most times, it’s a no-brainer.

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