Ring in the New Year with these approaches
Happy New Year! Let’s resolve to use these writing best practices in 2021:
1. Go beyond the subject line. Email recipients consider four elements — aka “the envelope” — when deciding whether to open or delete your message. If you’re not writing them, MailChimp is, and not too well. Get Ann’s best practices for email writing.
2. Reach readers where they are, not where you wish they were. Most Americans have basic or below-basic reading skills. That means that if you write at the 11th-grade reading level, you’ll miss 97% of Americans. Get Ann’s best practices for readability.
3. Stop agonizing over the right length for your blog post. Over-the-counter tools analyze successful posts to let you know what Google will rank for your search term. Get word length, keywords to use, readability levels and more. Get Ann’s content marketing-writing best practices.
4. Cut Through the Clutter. In a world of information overload, how do you get readers to pay attention to, understand, remember and act on your message? Get Ann’s persuasive-writing best practices.
5. Stop boring them to death. Reach more readers — and sell more products, services, programs and ideas — with storytelling, metaphor and other creative elements. The boss thinks that’s fluff? We’ve got the data to prove it works. Get Ann’s storytelling best practices.
6. Put your effort up top. Most writers spend very little time getting ready to write, more time writing and the most time fixing what they’ve written. But comma-jockeying ain’t writing, and the result is some pretty tepid prose. Get Ann’s best practices for the writing process.
7. Make sound bites sound better. One-quarter of journalists rank quotes the least important element in a news release — after the boilerplate and the dateline. How do your sound bites stack up? Get Ann’s PR-writing best practices.
8. Reach readers where their eyes are. Even highly educated European scientists read only 20% of the words on a web page. But which words are they reading? Get Ann’s best practices for writing for mobile.
Which writing skills will you invest in 2021?