Everyone starts new things on the first of the month, or on a Monday. This is the wrong approach. Here’s why you should start something big on a Friday. Starting things is hard. Starting on a Friday lets you put in a full day of hard work in the knowledge that you’ll have the weekend…
Five weeks ago, I hatched the idea to place a prominent contributed opinion piece, or “op-ed,” in the Ideas section of the Boston Sunday Globe, a major daily newspaper. Yesterday, the piece appeared, and I started to hear from people in positions of power. If you are a writer or thought leader, this is the…
I’ve been working with brilliant thinkers this month. Their brilliance doesn’t make them great writers — in fact, it sometimes gets in the way. The brilliant thinker often falls into what you might call the professor mode. After studying a subject in great deal — and often after accumulating massive amounts of experience — they…
Based on the number of #MeToo posts in my social media feeds and the news I’m reading from Hollywood and Silicon Valley, some men have a problem. They seem to be grappling with a mystifying phenomenon: what are women doing in my workplace? Since this blog is all about helping you, the reader, I’ll do…
If you want clear and useful thinking, you need a true analyst, not just somebody who calls themselves an analyst. True analysts pursue thinking as a discipline. Let’s look at the qualities and skills that define that discipline. If you watch TV or read the media, it seems like you’re always hearing from analysts —…
California middle school teacher Leilen Shelton wants her writing students to eschew simple words like “good,” “said,” and “fun,” according to the Wall Street Journal. To demonstrate the problems with this dumb idea, I rewrote a news article about terrorism, replacing all the mundane words with longer ones. Misguided writing teachers are responsible for much of the bullshit…
Weasel words weaken prose. But how do you fix them? First, what exactly is a weasel word? A weasel word is an adjective, adverb, noun, or verb that indicates quantity or intensity but lacks precision. Think of words like “deeply,” “most,” “backer,” and “tends to.” They express emotion, but mean little. I know why you…
When William Zinsser died in May, his obituaries praised his his book On Writing Well, originally published in 1976. It sold 1.5 million copies and, according to the back cover, was “[c]ited by critics as the natural companion of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style” (of course). So I read the copy I found for a…
You might be new at work. You might be shy. Maybe you’re just not at your best in person. Learning to write without bullshit could be the best way to boost your career. We all have an image of the “leaders” at work. They can stand in front of a group and inspire us. They’re…