Whether it’s a cover letter for your resume, a sales pitch to a client, a blog post, a Twitter tweet, or an internal business proposal, all of us need to write in a way that draws the reader closer to us.
We need writing that’s compelling, interesting, and unique. We need writing that’s magnetic.
Some think that magnetic writing is all about talent. But a few simple techniques can make any piece of writing more compelling.
Anyone can write a paragraph, but not everyone knows how to write one that other people want to read.
You’ve seen it:
You open a book, and the whole page is one long block of text.
Each sentence in the paragraph makes exactly the same point, said in a slightly different way, and you wonder why they didn’t just say it once and be done with it.
Write. Edit. Write. Edit. Edit. Edit. Edit. Write.
Does this sound familiar? If it doesn’t then you’re probably from Mars, because most of us drive ourselves crazy with self-editing when we write.
And it’s not only when writing.
Think it’s impossible to write with a knife?
Not at all. You might even say it’s essential.
Well, to be more precise, no one actually writes with a knife. But good writers do edit with one.
Some writers don’t seem to know when to shut up. They ramble and pontificate and theorize, seemingly oblivious to the agony it’s causing everyone else.
To avoid this awful fate, you probably try to keep your posts short, chopping up longer ideas into a series of posts. No need to scare away readers by dumping too much information on them all at once, right?
Makes sense, but what’s weird is it doesn’t work that way.
Vampires are everywhere at the moment. At the movies (Twilight), on your TV (True Blood) … and in your copy.
It’s nothing new. E.B. White recognised the problem in his revision of Strunk’s Elements of Style:
“Rather, very, little, pretty – these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.”
