Photo by Jan the manson

Here at some quick tips about writing in general that will help you keep your copy on track.

1. Know your big idea
Is there a single idea you’re trying to get across? If there is, make a note of it, and use it as a reminder to keep your writing focused. Continue reading →

For just about every kind of writing, it pays to absorb as many facts as possible before you start to write. This means doing your research.

When writing advertising copy, for example, you need to know everything you can about the product before you try to write or even start to have ideas.

Doing the reading and research is time consuming, and can seem like an arduous task. On the other hand, it’s something you can do even when you’re not feeling creative or in the writing ‘zone.’

You’ll probably find the copy writing itself.

And doing your research, getting all the facts uploaded into your mind, is one of the best ways to get into the writing zone in the first place. Continue reading →

Being concise is an art in itself.

Keep sentences short so they can be easily understood. Write only what is needed. If there are excess words, hack, prune and tear them out. Leave room for some colourful language to add interest and style. But kill the fluff.

Then, when have it just right, when it’s perfect, go back and edit out ten per cent of the word count.

Does your writing have personality? If you answer yes, then does it have enough?

If your writing has personality it will be more engaging and interesting. It will come across as more honest and trustworthy.

Not every form of writing needs to benefit from bags of personality. In a lot of serious news journalism, for example, objectivity is more important. In academic essays and exam papers, facts count for far more than personality.

But in letters, blogs, novels, even business reports, injecting some personality into your writing will almost certainly make it more successful. Continue reading →

Word of the day: audacious.

It’s not just a word to use in your writing. It’s a whole attitude to writing. Be audacious, because that way you’re more interesting. And so is your writing.

I can do no better than refer you to the thoughts of the inimitable skelliewag on the subject:

If you’re not afraid to be rejected, you keep putting your hand up. If you’re not afraid to be ignored, you keep putting yourself out there. If you’re not afraid to be criticized, you do exactly what you want…

The best thing about audacity is that it’s not a quality you either possess or you don’t. It’s not the same as beauty, or a gorgeous singing voice.

Audacity is a practice. Do audacious things, and you become audacious.

So next time you’re reading through your blog post, thinking about the next chapter of your novel, or struggling with copy for company leaflets, stop and add a little audacity just to liven things up. Don’t settle for good enough. Ask, is it audacious enough to get noticed?

Anyone who writes may also need to interview people to generate material. It can be intimidating at first, but it gets easier with practice.

And it’s something you should practice, because it’s a core skill for a writer.

So, here are my top ten tips for good interviewing (I’m sure you can add more. Please do so in the comments). Continue reading →

My previous post on writing as you talk has been wildly successful in the comments department (relatively, of course), so I’d like to clarify for a moment.

Of course you don’t write exactly as you talk. That would be stupid. Continue reading →

If you’ve read my post on the number one reason you find writing difficult, you’ll know it’s because you adopt a different, more formal tone when you sit down at a keyboard or pick up a pen. Now here’s three more reasons:

1) You haven’t thought through what you want to say

That’s bound to make things difficult. Take a spin around the room and talk it through with yourself (silently in your head is best. Doing this out loud gets you funny looks from the rest of the family / neighbours).

2) You haven’t done your research

You’ll need the facts to hand, and ideally uploaded into your mind, before you start. I find this is the most important part of a writing task. I get everything sorted in my mind, with the facts assembled, and then the words flow out once they are ready.

3) You’re trying to make it perfect.

Write a draft, a rough version, a sketch. You’ll be surprise how often it actually turns out really good anyhow, when you’re not trying too hard. And remember, there’s usually time to edit it later.

To get the writing juices flowing, you need to really know who you are writing for. But not just in an intellectual way. You need to picture them, know them.

Don’t try to write for the general public, or anyone who might be out there. Write for one person. Just one. Continue reading →

(Note: this article now comes with a health warning and partial retraction from the author).

One of the main reasons people find it difficult to write is because they adopt a more formal tone of voice as soon as there are words on paper (or the screen). It’s the fault of our education systems.

When people sit down to write, they suddenly come over all formal, or tongue-tied, or pompous. They start using a learnt tone of voice: Learnt from school, college, university, maybe the workplace. They start worrying about sounding important, and the structure of their sentences. They also start to waffle a lot - perhaps because they learnt to write by filling up word quotas for school essays.

Write how you talk.

What you need to do is write how you talk. With a little more care, clearly. You have the chance to think it through first and apply some structure. You have the chance to edit and improve. You should do these things.

But the tone of voice should be informal. Write how you talk. It sounds easy, but it often takes years to learn. Continue reading →

Relax, I’m not going to try to sell you an e-book. Or anything else for that matter.

Yes, wouldn’t it be amazing if you could get some real information about hypnotic writing, without all the hype and brouhaha?

You probably know that there’s such a thing as hypnotic writing, and you’re intelligent enough to know….

OK, I’ll stop it now. Above are just a few words and phrases which are important in the technique of hypnotic writing. But, I promise you, the rest of this post is going to be written in something approaching normal language (or as close as I can get, at any rate).

Hypnotic writing does exist. Hypnosis does exist. Can you use hypnosis to get anything you want in life? I doubt it. Can you sell ice to eskimos with hypnotic writing? Nah, I don’t think so.

But can a knowledge of these ideas help your writing? Yes, I think it can. Continue reading →

Journalists summarise the whole story in the first paragraph, and expand on the detail as they go along. So the most important and interesting stuff is at the top, and the fluff that is less useful or intriguing goes towards the end.

“The second paragraph? Who reads the second paragraph?”

There, I’ve gone and done it myself and now you don’t need to read the rest of this post. But wait… don’t go. There’s more you need to know first.

Until I decided to demonstrate this technique, with the first paragraph of this post, I was intending to start with a little reminiscence about a great movie from 1974 called The Front Page. It stars Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon as the editor and reporter in a 1920s Chicago newspaper.

At one point, Lemmon, the intrepid reporter, is filing copy about a notoriously dangerous criminal who has broken out of jail and stolen a gun. He’s on the loose, on the prison roof.

“Where’s the bit about the gun?”

Reading the copy, Matthau asks something along the lines of: “Where’s the bit about the gun?”

(I’m doing this from memory, as I don’t have a copy of the film to hand).

Lemmon replies: “It’s in the second paragraph.”

To which Matthau, the editor, says: “The second paragraph? Who reads the second paragraph?”

And it’s all there, in that one-liner - just about everything you need to know about writing in the newspaper style. It’s an education in journalism, all by itself.

Continue reading →