I’ve just come from reading a clear and concise e-book titled “The Road to Hell is Paved with Adverbs.” This book deals with the usage of adverbs in writing.

Patrick McLean, whom I first encountered as the author of the podcast ‘The Seanachai,’ has an excellent approach to information delivery. I’m going to make an assumption here and say that it’s probably a result of his years in advertising, which means trying to deliver information and emotion in a confined space where nobody really wants to listen to you anyway.

For a person or company to market effectively value must be provided in every interaction. This value is provided by good content. When I talk about this subject I get a lot of smiles and head nods. But very few people implement.
– Patrick E. McLean

In any event, if you are interested in writing — whether it be fiction, copywriting, or letters to your maiden aunt — I wholeheartedly recommend that you read this e-book. Then you’ll be able to note just how many unnecessary adverbs I’ve used in this post … I assure you, I’ve been paying much better attention since perusing Patrick’s book.

I’m also extremely jealous of his url. Wish I’d thought of that one!

Enjoy!
Heidi

Photo source: Andrew Eick via Flickr.

Have you ever had a project that had to be just right?  Or a special occasion you were planning, which was incredibly important to you?  Perhaps you have started a business, or wanted to build your own website.

Remember how every part had to be just right, and you weren’t really sure you could let anyone else do anything? I mean, you were just going to have to redo their work, right?

You’ve got the Baby Syndrome.  You not only have to micromanage your project, you pretty much do or redo everything to do with it, trying to get it perfect.  And yet, many times, parts of your ‘baby’ needed to be completed that you had no experience with. Perhaps you tried over and over and just couldn’t satisfy yourself.

Did you end up trashing it all?  Or did you settle for an inferior product?

Why is it so hard to let go and let someone who has actually been trained in and practiced over and over take part in making your baby a thing of beauty?

For me, personally, it’s usually ego.  Hey, if anyone can do it, I can.  After all, I know exactly what I want, right?  Well, I usually have an idea of what I like. Or I could pick it out in a line-up.  “Yeah, the one on the right, that looks about right.  No, not the one with the mustache. The other one.”

But I’ve finally faced the music.  I can’t design anywhere near as well as someone who is trained as a graphic designer.  And I don’t know user experience the way someone who has made it a life’s obsession does.

I shouldn’t be too proud, too involved, or too afraid to ask for help.  Or my ‘baby’ (usually a website or something else that needs artwork and color coordination) will disappoint me, and be ineffective in what I want it to do.  I focus on my strengths – transmitting information via the written word.

Do what you do.  And if you need something else done, if it’s important enough to you, you’ll find someone to do it right.

Photo Source: Shahram Sharif

So, the space between these last two posts would seem to imply I may have taken this last point rather too seriously!

This point is easy to complete, however.

Once you have finished a project, let it go!  Do not forever edit and harp and niggle at how it could be improved.  Publish, and move on.  If there is a glaring error, you may edit it.  But be sure it is absolutely necessary!  You’re done.  Put your energy to work in new ways.

Photo Source: Belinda Hankins Miller

I usually get excited when I’ve finished writing a project.  It seems like a lot of work has finally come together, a culmination of ideas and effort.  However, this is generally the most dangerous point in your work.  Don’t publish yet!  Take a couple of hours, go do something unrelated, and then come back to it.

It is impossible, as I mentioned above, to take something you have been working on for a long period of time and read it for what it actually is.  This step is somewhat combined and dependent on the step above it.  Depending on who your proofreader is, you may have caught everything already.  If you have merely used the ‘unsuspecting reader,’ though, it becomes more important to reset your mental palate before testing your work again.

Occasionally, big edits occur at this step: perhaps that point should logically come before that one, perhaps that paragraph just doesn’t make any sense now.  But the things I usually find here are fiddly little misspellings, places where I may have started writing one sentence and finished with the end of another, because my mind was moving faster than my fingers.

So, go wash the dishes or something.  Clean your room.  What little chore have you been putting off?  Then, with a refreshed mind, come back and re-read it.  Then you can publish to your heart’s content.

What you can do is read it through one last time. This time, read it aloud or simply speak each word in your head. You know what I mean — be absolutely sure that you give each word its moment in the spotlight. When you’ve finished reading and changing all the suffixes that were somehow in the wrong tense, it’s time to find yourself an unsuspecting reader.

Photo source: ClickFlashPhotos

There are two kinds of reader you can choose from. The first kind knows all about what you’re writing, especially if it’s technical and complicated, and can tell you when you’ve said something silly. The second kind doesn’t know anything at all about your subject matter. Both readers are important, and you should determine for each piece whether you need a particular one or both.

If the subject you’re writing on is at all new or unfamiliar to you, then the knowledgeable proofreader is priceless. Ask them to read over your work, and take any criticism to heart. The second type of reader is important regardless of what type of writing you are doing. This reader may or may not know much about your specific subject matter, and may or may not know much about English and grammar in general — what you need here is a normal person. Someone you can trust to read your project and let you know at which points they were confused or lost or what didn’t make sense to them. These are the points you need to change.

I love writing beautiful, flavorful, glorious sentences. But sometimes those are difficult to understand, especially to a casual reader. The last thing you want to do is confuse or frustrate someone who is reading your material. It is important, as a writer, to realize that languages are not static. They are not so strictly ruled as they may appear. English, for example is constantly changing, evolving, survival of the fittest words, the prettiest words, the words that survive fad-dom and come to mean and imply ideas their creators never meant. Your writing should reflect all that is best and most widely understood in the current form of language.

Now, I’m not saying that it’s wrong to be colorful, or stand out from the herd — but be very aware of whether your writing can be easily understood by an average person. When you write, even technical subjects should be formatted so that when your reader finds a word he doesn’t know, he can still understand the sentence. Make that a priority, take time to change the composition where it confuses your ‘unsuspecting reader,’ and your writing will be clear and appealing to people who stumble across it.

Who is your target audience?  Remember, the reason you’re writing in the first place is to convey information someone wants to know or to teach them something you want them to know.  Perhaps that seems simplistic, but I think it fairly well covers what we’ve been talking about.  Taking that into consideration, the last thing you want to do is suddenly throw a bunch of phrases and terms at them that they know nothing about!

The importance (and difficulty) of this step can vary, depending on your target audience.  Are you a nerd writing about your software to try to get a non-technical consumer to buy it?  Then you need to keep any technospeak to an absolute minimum.  Use real language, the kind that people encounter every day to get your points across.  Don’t randomly insert acronyms you’re familiar with without thinking very hard about whether they are needed.

If an acronym is absolutely needed, be sure that you spell out what it is the first time you use it.  If you’re writing for an entire website, still give the words the acronym is derived from on each page the first time it’s mentioned.  As on a recent website I wrote, if a word or acronym is an integral part of your company — like the main product — then perhaps you should have a page dedicated to explaining that term.

Many times, the words used to produce an acronym can’t in and of themselves explain it to the common person.  For example, if you don’t know what a RIA is, does telling you that it’s a Rich Internet Application really clear it up for you? If you are using complex vocabulary, make sure that you are using it in the proper sense and the proper context; the reader should be able to figure out characteristics of the word from the sentence around it, even if they don’t get right off exactly what it means.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you dumb everything down relentlessly, until anyone who actually knows what you’re talking about gets bored and has to move on before their brain melts; consider a page you’re writing as a conversation.  You’re talking to real people — just because it’s a composition does NOT mean you should write it for your college English teacher.  As I’ve mentioned before, it is much more important for the largest possible segment of the population to be able to clearly comprehend what you’re saying than for you to get an A on your paper.  I’m sure if your English teacher is reading, she’ll be grateful to you for getting across what you need to say in the simplest and most concise manner possible.  On the internet, there are no extra points for more words, bigger words, or super-complex sentences.  Leave them out.

I usually wait until this point to start worrying about keyword density.  When you’re writing for search engine optimization (SEO), it’s important to think about what words people will use to find the site you’re working on.  Take a step back, and think about the services or goods you’re writing about.  If you were a customer, what words would you use to search for these goods?  If you were a clueless customer?  If you were a very specific customer?  Location might be important to you; for example, a restaurant would need to show up for the area it actually serves.

The best way to use SEO is to integrate it into the site architecture.  From the bottom up, the urls, page structure, and all those little details are fashioned to be efficient at providing search engines such as Google and Yahoo! with all the right stimuli to find your site.  In these cases, I like to work closely with whoever is behind the actual site building, and they can provide me the keywords to use.  Sometimes, however, I generate them myself.  There are a couple of important things to consider.

First, as I mentioned earlier, location.  Where are you, what area do you service?  Second, generic words that people might use to find you; commonly used words that are still specific enough to your industry.  Okay, so you have the most smashing brand name in the country, and you want your ‘Widgettios’ to have name recognition.  But you can’t count on people searching for Widgettios.  What in the world is a Widgettio, anyway?  So you need to think about it more simply — Widgettios count unshelled peanuts and package them in groups of three.  Think about how a stranger might understand your product.  Incorporate words like ‘peanuts,’ ‘counting,’ ‘packaging’ and ‘legumes’ into your text.  Don’t try for too many keywords at once; stick to something between two and six on each page, depending on where it is and how much text you have to work with.

Google AdWords is extremely helpful with keyword generation — they can give you metrics on how often a string or term is searched.  If you use words that are too general and too widely searched, you will be lost in the crowd.  If you use words that are too obscure, no one will ever find you.  So there’s a delicate balance to reach.  Practice makes perfect, as they say, and Google Analytics can help you determine what searches actually find your pages, so you can work on improving any low-performance issues.

Most people recommend a 3% to 5% keyword density. Some experts do recommend higher or lower densities, and search engines continue to evolve in an effort to continue to deliver effective results. For the current environment, if you are much lower than 3%, search engines will not rank you high enough; but at above 5%, you risk the text sounding very repetitive and wooden.  To find your simple keyword density, take the number of keywords and divide them by the total number of words in your text.  Word processors are handy for this, because you can use the search functions to find words.  I like to put a * by each keyword, then have it count how many *s I have in the document.  Easy-peasy.

It can be challenging at first to insert keywords into your text; personally, I tend to dislike using the same word in a composition more than a couple of times.  It makes reading more interesting when you use synonyms instead.  But drop those barriers for now, and think about which places you can use the same word, without sounding stilted.  Read your piece out loud, and if you start laughing at how silly it sounds, reconsider.

photo by Elektra Noelani Fisher

Sure, the piece won’t be organized correctly — but that’s one of the wonderful things about using a word processor.  It’s easy to edit your documents.  Who cares if you don’t follow your outline exactly?  The big goal is to simply get as many words on the page as you can, in complete sentences related to your topic. I take my list of objectives and, one by one, I cross them off.  After that’s finished, I can cut and paste sentences or paragraphs, rearrange lists, and clean up the flow of thought.   

Editing for sense is important — but when there’s nothing on the page, there’s nothing to edit. Don’t worry about punctuation, grammar, or sentence order.  That’s the entire purpose of editing. This is a rough draft — treat it like one, not like some precious irreplaceable incunabulum!  Rough drafts are meant to be cut up.  To be rearranged.  To be sadistically mangled until they meet your approval!  

Okay, I admit it.  I love to write something, double-check my spelling once, and be done.  But good writing simply isn’t that easy.  Blog posts are one thing; emails to your mother are another; static type on a website, or your final product to be printed and published around the country (or world!) are different.  If you’re serious about your reputation as a writer, you’ll take the care necessary to maintain it.

Writing is not hard.  What is hard, and what trips most people up when they are writing, is organization.  When you want to write clearly, it is important to have a clear idea of what you are going to say.  Before you begin, think about your idea.  You can think about it with a pen and paper or a word processor, if that helps you to work better.  Make a list, jot down words that you could use, outline your article.  You are about to present your idea to the world — give it a fighting chance by working through your argument. Think about the timeline of the piece and how it should flow.

For example, if your subject is a person and you want to write about their life, say a profile for a website or magazine or some such, you may have a questionnaire they have filled out.  Put the pertinent information in the same document where you are going to write, and check off the important points as you accomplish them.  Keeping track of what you need to cover will help you stay on track if you veer off onto a side issue.

You can also refer back to the list after your first draft, to see whether you have gone too far in any direction, and need to prune your piece.  Perhaps that extra paragraph is the seed for next week!  GoogleDocs is my favorite place to write, because of the complete accessibility from any location and the easy cut and paste and save if I need to put an idea somewhere else.  Also, I appreciate the auto-save.  Can’t tell you how many times I’ve nearly lost several hours worth of work …

If you’re not in a place where you can write, but you have a great idea, put it on paper or save it in an email to yourself, just a basic sentence and perhaps one or two theme words.  You can continue to think about it as you go about your business; I often find that percolation is the best possible thing for an idea that needs to be fleshed out.

Aa is for Apple, Bb is for Bear …

I’ve been mulling recently about how communication changes over time.  I daresay it’s something that comes up every now and again, but I’m wondering exactly how cyclical it really is.  Writing as a mode of communication dates back pretty far, I’m told.  A quick Google search brings up some symbols people think date back to 3000BC, as well as a couple of new findings being dated to 6000 BC.  Disputed dating systems aside, I don’t think I’ll get much argument if I state that writing isn’t anything new.

While writing has been around for a while, it hasn’t always been terribly accessible.  There are various periods in history where, because of oppression or the fact that there were more pressing needs, many people never learned to read and / or write.  There are still various countries in the world where reading is not the norm, and it only takes a couple of minutes to read pages on the National Institute for Literacy and find that there are quite a few people who think that we in the US aren’t doing so well, either.

Before this turns into a dissertation on literacy, let’s think about other modes of communication.  Obviously we have speaking, person to person and face to face.  My personal experience tends to quantify this as the most common mode of communication.  Aside from that, though, we have gestures, pictures, and voice over some type of transporter.  Notice that I am speaking of direct, conscious, intentional communication.  I’m not trying to get into body language or anything quite so deep.

Over the years since writing became more widespread, people have also developed the telephone, by which means we can hear each other speaking, and there’s no need to write it down, and the video, where we can both see and hear.  I think it’s interesting, though, that there seems to be a trend back towards writing, at least among the technologically-minded around the globe.  Email, chatting, and blogging seem to be assisting this — how should I put it — redistribution.  Writing may never have completely gone out of style, and we’re not going to cease telephone and video anytime soon, but I have been thinking about how the Internet itself seems to promote the mode of communication which demands both literacy and legibility.

If I can’t write, you can’t read it.  And if you can’t read, my writing is pointless.  Unless I plan to read it later, of course.  Depending on how clearly I write, the number of people who can understand me will grow or diminish.  The lower the vocabulary level of the people reading, the less they’ll be able to decipher.  It seems a pretty precarious balance, at times.

Well, so much for my recent thoughts.  I’m interested in hearing from people who actually know about this subject, or even just have new points of view.  Give me a holler!  Or write something.  Then I can read it.