Golden Practices Blog

Streamline Your Writing; Improve Readership

Whatever it is you write—your blog, a tweet, an article, a book, a newsletter, web content, or even a good, old-fashioned letter, memo, or email—you want the reader to easily GET what you are saying and act on it.

To accomplish this, you need clarity. And, these days, you need brevity.

One of my favorite bloggers, Dianna Huff, has a terrific blog post called Pruning Deadwood From Your Copy. Of her 5 tips, #3 is my favorite:

Hunt down redundancies. When I write fast and without effort, I find my copy is full of useless words that I use over and over and ideas that I communicate two or three or four times (just like this sentence, ha!).

Here is how I can edit this sentence: When writing fast and without effort, my copy becomes bloated with useless words and repeated ideas.

I love how she illustrated her point. I see redundancies in my work when I rush and almost always in a first draft or braindump. Calling myself out on it more often, I really notice it now in other people's writing.

Dianna's post is for EVERYONE. It is a quick read and worth printing and tacking to the wall!

It's Time

It's, well, time for a LOT of things. But it's high time for two things as I write this:

1) MUST introduce you to Debra Helwig's blog, Service Minded. Debra is the chief evangelist of many things for CPA firm association, IGAF Worldwide. She is committed to the core of continously advancing her association's offerings, quality, and "experiences" for every single member. And she promotes wise practices for every level employee...owner, marketer, receptionist... 

Best of all, she totally practices what she preaches--no easy thing for a busy evangelist and mom. If you are a service provider and you don't read any other blog, you must read hers!

2) You'll see in Debra's recent post, Letting Go, a stark reminder that surrendering less-than-perfect relationships is not just best for you but better for the client, too. We sometimes hang on to client relationships believing we are doing the client a favor, but in many cases, we aren't!

Check out her post. Then subscribe to her blog.