Why write email that’s easy to skim?

6 writing resolutions to improve your copy in 2019

Want to achieve your New Year’s resolutions this year? Just do as I do: Resolve to watch more reality TV.

Writing tips — **Here’s to your 2019 writing career** Kick off 2019 right when you ring in the New Year with these writing tips. *Image from iStock*

But if you actually want to achieve something worthwhile in 2019, here are six writing resolutions to make today:

1. Remember the reader.

“You’ve got to be a good date for the reader.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, American novelist, author of Slaughterhouse-Five and other black comedies

To make your next blog post, press release or pitch more relevant to your readers, try leading with this formula:

X who have struggled with Y will now be able to Z, thanks to A.

Here’s how it looks in action:

Commuters who now spend an hour each day driving from Sunrise Beach to Osage Beach will soon be able to make the trip in 15 minutes, thanks to a new bridge that ABC Company will build this summer.

That’s far more likely to produce good writing that engages the reader than the tired “ABC Company yesterday announced that …” lead.

Learn a system for Thinking Like a Reader.

2. Make your message look easier to read.

“I don’t divide the world into ‘loyal readers’ and ‘scanners.’ I suspect all readers are scanners.”

— Don Fry, faculty member at The Poynter Institute

There’s nothing like reading a Facebook feed of 80-character status updates to make a 400-word blog post seem impenetrable.

To make copy look more inviting, pass The Palm Test. That is, use subheads, bold-faced lead-ins, bulleted lists and other display copy to break copy up into chunks no larger than the palm of your hand.

And remember: Your palm is the fleshy part of your hand. Add your fingers, and that’s your whole hand.

Whether you’re planning to write a book or a tweet, you’ll reach a lot of people if you pass The Palm Test.

Learn more online writing tips.

3. Activate the passive voice.

“Use the active voice. The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive.”

— Strunk & White, The Elements of Style

Whether you are a young writer or a seasoned one, the passive voice can cause some confusion. So how do you identify the passive voice?

If you can add “by my grandma” to the end of a sentence, it’s probably the passive voice, says Tim Burnett, who handles Express communications at FedEx. Example: “A nap was taken … by my grandma.”

Once you’ve identified the passive voice, make sure the subject is doing the verb:

Find the verb.
Ask who’s doing the verb.
Move that subject in front of the verb.

Result: “My grandma took a nap.”

That’s important. Passive voice reduces comprehension, is longer than the active construction, feels bureaucratic, sucks the energy from sentences and isn’t conversational.

Activate it.

Learn more techniques for improving readability.

4. Squeeze in a story.

“Stories are the most powerful form of human communication.”

— Peg C. Neuhauser, author, Corporate Legends and Lore

Stories are among the best tools in a writer’s toolbelt. But too many communicators avoid anecdotes because they feel they don’t have enough space.

Master writers, however, can tell a compelling story in a few words.

The Beatles’ song “Eleanor Rigby,” for instance has only 179 words, points out Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer Tom French. Yet the song contains three stories — and a chorus.

In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee shares this tiny tale:

In 2005, a man diagnosed with multiple myeloma asked me if he would be alive to watch his daughter graduate from high school in a few months. In 2009, bound to a wheelchair, he watched his daughter graduate from college. The wheelchair had nothing to do with his cancer. The man had fallen down while coaching his youngest son’s baseball team.

This mini story by the Associated Press about evacuating Hurricane Katrina refugees from the Superdome took on a life of its own:

… Pets were not allowed on the bus, and when a police officer confiscated a little boy’s dog, the child cried until he vomited. “Snowball, Snowball,” he cried.

How can you squeeze a compelling story into your next piece?

Learn the secrets of successful storytelling.

5. Come up with better ideas.

“There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there, you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.”

— Stephen King, novelist, in On Writing

Stop waiting for the muse. Instead, use the 5-step creative process to come up with better idea, overcome writers’ block and end-run procrastination:

Forage, or gather information. Before you start writing, feed your brain with background research, interviews and other raw material.
Analyze that information. Sift through, focus and organize that information. Look for themes, holes, relationships and structure.
Incubate. Let the information simmer. This is where you take your eye off the ball and let the back of your mind work on your project for a while.
Break through. This is the magical moment where your brain presents a brilliant idea fully formed.
Knuckle down. Take Ernest Hemingway’s advice and “apply the seat of your pants to the seat of the chair.” In other words, turn your great idea into a great story.

It’s the process, people: Use these steps in this order, and you’ll find that you’re able to come up with more — and more useful — ideas.

Master an effective writing process.

6. Write tight sound bites.

“What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.”

— Mark Twain, American author and wit

Mark Twain was right: Short quotes just sound better.

So how long should your corporate quotes be?

Take a tip from The New York Times and keep quotes to 20 words or less. With an emphasis on or less.

Twenty words was the average length of a quote in one issue of the Times, which Wylie Communications analyzed a couple of years ago. (We skipped the sports pages.)

We found that, excluding attribution, the Times’:

Average length of a quote was 19 to 20 words.
Median length was 18 words.
Most common length was 7 words.

Here’s what that looks like:

20 words:

“An officer can gain no Fourth Amendment advantage,” the chief justice wrote, “through a sloppy study of the laws he is duty-bound to enforce.”

18 words:

“He knew he was deserting the Army and would be charged, but killing himself was a bigger sin,” said Brig. Gen. Stephen Xenakis, a retired Army psychiatrist who testified for the defense during the sentencing phase of the trial.

7 words:

“You can predict behavior you can’t observe,” said Aleksander Obabko, a computational engineer at Argonne.

That’s a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.

Bonus tip: Quantify your value.

Numbers sell stories. For instance, articles with numerals in their titles tend to be shared more on Facebook than stories without digits, according to a study by viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella.

So quantify the value that your piece delivers: Offer 10 tips, 7 steps — or 6 New Year’s writing resolutions.