I recently ran across a blog post called ‘10 Signs Your Writing Might Stink & How to Fix It‘. While the blog is about writing non-profit newsletters, these are very important points to think about for anyone who wants to get their ideas across. These points in particularly seemed to apply to anyone trying to make themselves understood:

“1. You are cutting and pasting grant application text into your newsletters.” - change this to cutting and pasting from ANY document you use to communicate with other professionals similar to yourself. If you’re expecting an executive to understand your communication with another techie, forget it. Not only won’t they understand, they’ll tune you out and you won’t get your message across.

“2. You can play Nonprofit Buzzword Bingo with yourself.” - can you play ‘Techie Buzzword Bingo’ with yourself? If you’re writing with lots of buzzwords, you’re probably not communicating.

“3. You find yourself skimming your own writing. If you don’t have the patience to actually read what you wrote, what makes you think the rest of us will?” RIGHT ON POINT! if you don’t find your own writing interesting and exciting enough to keep reading, why SHOULD anyone else?

“4. Your boss takes forever to get comments back to you.” Not a sure guide since it may be the boss’ problem, but it could also be that the boss is reluctant to start because they know it’ll take forever to do a good job.

“5. The article you just wrote could have been written ten years ago.” Most techies I know aren’t plagued by this one, they’re right up-to-date. But your boss probably isn’t and neither are your readers. If you’re so far on the cutting edge that you’re bleeding and that’s coming through in your writing, you’re probably losing people.

“8. When reading your writing out loud, you can’t get to the end of most sentences without taking a breath.” Take this one SERIOUSLY. Read what you’re writing OUT LOUD. Even better, record it and play it back to yourself. Listen to your breathing, do you take a deep breath at the end of a sentence? if so, SHORTEN IT.

“10. You try to cover everything, just in case this is the only thing they’ll read.” The most important three things in Real Estate are LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION. In writing, it’s FOCUS FOCUS FOCUS. It’s not easy and all of us are guilty of it, but it’s a sure way to lose people. You see this often in emails where someone tries to cram everything into a single email. DON’T DO IT if you want to get your point across!

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