When you’re afraid of how people will react, you distance yourself from what you write. This makes your writing weak, which makes you seem weak. Fearful writers use language to evade blame. They: Bury the lead. Flounder around before getting to the point. Use passive voice. When you say “mistakes were made” you conceal who’s responsible. Use weasel…
Everybody Writes by Ann Handley is a spectacularly useful book about writing, organized into 74 bite-sized chunks. Ann and I look at the world through the same eyes, and we are fighting the same fight — to help you express yourself more clearly. Here’s my interview with her: Why a book on writing now? There are so…
Two people are arguing in print. Who do you believe? The one who writes more clearly, not necessarily the one that’s right. Which brings us to deflategate. When the Patriots played the Colts in this year’s AFC championship game, officials found some of the balls to be underinflated. The NFL just finished investigating whether the Patriots intentionally let air…
A company with a clear mission has a soul. The soul motivates workers to contribute in positive ways to a shared goal. What do you call a company that has no soul? A zombie company. A zombie keeps moving forward but exercises no judgment. A zombie company has financial incentives where the soul should be. People do things because it…
Passive voice sentences conceal who is acting and create creepy feelings in the reader. Fixing them reveals the truth and improves the tone of your writing. If you write advice or instructions of any kind, here’s your tutorial. Look at this example I encountered last night at the Red Sox game, where the team wrote the rules for “Friendly” Fenway…
When you read about corporate transformations, be wary. Reporters love to tell these stories, because they humanize companies. We love to read them. But they’re stories, which is not the same thing as truth. Take this article about about how Comcast is transforming its customer experience, “Comcast Knows How Much You Hate Them,” by Richard Rys, in…
Once there was a product manager named Joan who worked at an Italian foods company called Patitucci’s Delights. Joan loved Italian food, and she loved helping her company sell it and make a profit. She was in charge of prepared dinner products, working alongside two other product managers for pasta and sauces. Joan had a…
Writing as a Forbes contributor, Steve Denning makes a great point in his analysis of the failure of Google+, Google’s social network. “Google’s mission statement is clear and simple, but wrong,” he writes. Here’s that mission statement: Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful. As Denning puts it:…
All day long we read on our various screens. This has vastly increased the demand for content, which comes to us through many channels. But those who create it have forgotten what good writing is. Think back to the world of 1980. The average consumer or businessperson at that time had no email, and there was no Internet. What…