This year don’t just overhaul your health, relationships, career etc. Think about improving a tool that you use probably every day—your writing.
This new year resolution will cost you nothing, save you time and be easy to keep. What’s more, the decision to improve your writing will also improve how you work.
So, start 2016 by giving a big swerve to five bad writing habits. And replace them with five good ones!
Ditch these five habits
- Dumping everything you know into your document. Your reader doesn’t want to know everything that you know. They just want enough information and insight to learn something easily, make a decision quickly, or take action.
- Rambling through your ‘story’, like a Sunday stroll. Workplace writing should nearly always be a sprint. Your reader wants to get to the end as fast as possible.
- Offending people. Whatever you think, and whatever you are tasked with explaining, do not take down others in your quest. Being persuasive and convincing is great; being rude or bullying is absolutely out.
- Making it all about you. Don’t use fancy words that show off your vocabulary. And avoid complicated sentence structures to prove your handle on semi-colons and complex clauses. Stick to simple expression that the reader can understand the first time that they read it. Nobody wants to get to the end of a sentence and wonder what it means!
- Leaving the key idea to the end. Lay out your key message at the start, elaborate on it (and prove it) in the middle, and repeat it at the end. Those three steps cover nearly every writing scenario. Easy.
Pick up these five habits
- Listening to the people who matter. Do you know the people who are the knowledge holders, trend setters and opinion makers in your subject area? What are they saying? And how do their ideas affect what you say in your document?
- Simplifying your words. Stick to plain English. It’s easy to write, easy to read and easy to understand.
- Reaching the decision maker. You have to be sure your document arms your reader with enough ammo to persuade the real decision maker. Imagine your document is like an advertisement for ice-cream: kids love the idea of ice-cream but parents want to buy fruit, so your document needs to appeal to kids AND parents. That is, your ideas have to persuade both your reader and their manager/supervisor too.
- Repeating yourself. Like a cave man, you need to bludgeon your readers with your ideas. Do not let readers walk away from your document without those ideas tumbling around their head.
- Tracking your ‘audience’. Talk to your readers, so you know whether they like your writing style and presentation. Do they want to see more tables and graphs? Do they need a separate summary document? Do they read everything or just skim it? Are you ‘liked’ as a writer?
There you go: 10 easy tips for taking your work writing to the next level. And this is a resolution that will give you results even before the end of January.