I’ve cured many writers of the passive habit. I can cure you, too. All it takes is the 5 R’s: recognize, raise awareness, reconsider, rewrite, and retrain. Think of this process the way you’d think of changing your diet. Let’s say you want to cut down on sugar. First you need to recognize why sugar is a…
We’re coming up on 100 years since William Strunk, Jr. told us to avoid the passive voice. What’s the big deal? Simply put: it makes the reader work harder. It hides the “who” in sentences, plunging the reader into a mysterious world in which things happen without actors or causes. Creepy! I’ll illustrate five common passive-voice…
Ideas just happen. Or do they? As I’ve set myself ambitious goals for content, I need a process that generates ideas reliably. It fascinates me how my process requires both structure and randomness to work. I honed these techniques as SVP of idea development for Forrester Research, and now I use them constantly. Perhaps you…
I’ve run a little experiment on this blog in the last three months. I’ve attempted to start every post with around 50 words that would draw you in. It’s working. In my view the title and first few sentences of a blog post should: Intrigue the reader. Promise what’s coming, accurately. Incorporate a clever or counterintuitive…
In English, there are things you can count on . . . like the fact that “they” is plural. Except it isn’t always. Let me see if I can convince you. As my coauthors and I were writing The Mobile Mind Shift, one of them came up with this central definition: A mobile moment is a point…
The brilliant psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the experience of “flow” — of being productive, in the moment, and making rapid progress on work that matches well to your skills. Flow creates great writing, but it happens only if you prepare properly. If you’re writing something longer than 1000 words, it matters how you write it. You’re…
In the 1964 bestseller “Games People Play,” Eric Berne showed how transactional analysis (TA) explains emotional conflict. In TA, people interact in one of three roles: parent, adult, or child; when roles get confused, people get upset. These same kinds of conflicts occur, for similar reasons, when writers and editors aren’t clear about the roles they’re playing. Here’s the briefest possible explanation…
Editing is like going to the dentist — nobody likes it, but you’ll avoid a lot of pain and ugliness if you get the right help at the right time. And you need to pick the right intensity of editing to match what your writing needs; you can’t fix a toothache with just a cleaning. Good…
When I cut the cable cord, I did it to get more of what I wanted (speed), not to save money. The economics are reasonable, but the benefits are a lot better. My earlier post that described how I cut the cable cord was far more popular than I expected. Several of you asked about the actual…