Turn corporate sludge into focused, compelling writing
Your business success depends on your ability to craft messages and stories with clarity, efficiency, and focus. Whether you are writing a persuasive e-mail to an executive, an entertaining story for your intranet, a news release, or a disappointing message to a colleague, your writing needs to be precise, interesting, and convincing.
The Writing With Clarity workshops have helped thousands of professionals worldwide at such companies as Chevron, Visa, Oracle, Campbell’s Soup, Raytheon, Sprint, John Deere, Burson-Marsteller, and Fleishman Hillard.
A writer’s notebook is a valuable tool to capture words, phrases, and ideas that occur to you through the day and that you might want to use in your writing. The purpose of the notebook, which could be an iPad, a traditional paper notebook, or even a 3×5 card, is to scribble down snippets of information that occur to you when you are away from your desk. The information could take sever...
At the top of the abstraction ladder are obscure terms and concepts that leave you in a fog; at the bottom is concrete language that people can visualize. You see a promo for a “virtual knowledge transfer event” and then realize it’s a webinar. You discover that a company promoting its “point-of-sale solutions” is really selling cash registers. Or you read about a Hum...
Knowing where to use a comma after the word so is often challenging. Sometimes you need it; other times you should omit it because the context is different. The comma is the most common punctuation mark and the one people wrestle with the most, particularly when it involves words such as so, when, where, which, and however. Let’s look at so. The word so serves as different parts of speech, m...
Summary paragraphs are helpful to readers, but while many people have heard of them, few people actually write them. In an email of several paragraphs, a formal memo, or a report, the opening paragraph should give the reader a window into what the entire memo is about. Here are the hallmarks of a summary paragraph: It is usually two, three, or four sentences in length, occasionally longer dependi...
A Wall Street Journal story about the increasing demand for foods that say “protein” on the packaging, http://on.wsj.com/ZsMZhK, highlights the careful use of words for a persuasive effect. For nearly a century, marketing people and politicians have carefully chosen words that have positive connotations, because those words influence the way people think about a product, issue, or person. And...
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