Write It Well — Training and Books for Business Writing

Biz India Loves Our Book!

Write It Well — Thu, 10 May 2012 10:10:11 +0000

Biz India reviewed our book, Professional Writing Skills and loved it. An e-book version is coming soon!

“All of our e-mail has improved after training,” a client said today!

Write It Well — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 04:55:22 +0000

Write It Well client, Saima Siddiqui, Senior Associate Director, Career Services, at the National University of Singapore says that after Write It Well’s e-mail training, she noticed a big difference in the quality of e-mail that flies around the office. ”There are no more big chunks of text; people use more bullet points,” And, Saima said, “the e-mail subject lines are better too. People are changing them when the subject changes. I love that.” We do too.

Writing Effective, Well-Tailored Resumes

Write It Well — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:21:59 +0000

Written communication is as important to many jobs as technical knowledge and leadership skills. Whatever your field is, you often have to demonstrate solid writing skills before you can persuade hiring managers that your full range of abilities will benefit their organizations.

Problematic writing in a cover letter or resume can sabotage your chances of being interviewed for a job, so we recently wrote an entire book with strategies just for these crucial job-application documents.

Many people find these documents stressful to write, and we thought we’d share some of our tips and tools with you here. It is possible to tailor resumes and cover letters both to an individual organization’s hiring needs and to your own unique professional history.

Several recruiters and career specialists told us that a resume often receives only 20 seconds of a hiring manager’s attention. Here are some tips for writing resumes that get readers’ attention in that very short time frame:

Use active language and clear, specific, plain English
Make sure you maintain parallel list structure as you list past experiences (e.g., by starting all a list’s items with verbs that end in -ed)
Proofread carefully to avoid an impression of carelessness and project a reliable image instead

And here’s a process that helps a job applicant write more impressive descriptions of past experience:

Read the job description carefully, and identify the kinds of routine problems you’ll solve if you’re hired at the organization.
Think of a time you faced a similar problem at a previous job.
Describe the problem, the action you took to solve it, and the beneficial result you achieved for your past employer.
Tell that problem-action-result story as concisely as possible.

A typical resume item representing Step 4 is “[Performed task X] [in response to challenge Y], [achieving beneficial result Z].” A problem or challenge can be as simple as meeting a tight deadline or satisfying a client or manager.

Quantifiable results stand out in a resume — e.g., “Streamlined a customer support process to eliminate delays in response times, boosting the customer retention rate by 10%.”

Remember that your resume and cover letter are your most important marketing tools. Solid planning can help you showcase your analytical and communication skills.

With careful writing, your writing can become a powerful marketing tool. Write It Well’s techniques can help you turn your resumes and cover letters into a concise, effective pitch for your professional abilities.

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Look for our forthcoming print book, e-book, iPad folio, and e-learning module on resumes and cover letters!

Punctuation and Eating Your Beets

Write It Well — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 22:47:51 +0000

Missing punctuation can confuse your customers and clients. Clear punctuation may take some extra effort, but it helps readers follow your ideas and realize you care about being understood.

Some sentences are simple enough not to need commas — e.g., to use a Wall Street Journal writer’s example, “Beets are available throughout the year but their flesh is particularly flavorful when the weather warms.”

Commas are often necessary to help readers follow your ideas. Here’s another correctly punctuated sentence:

Shaved into paper-thin rounds, spring beets provide an earthy, sharp flavor that’s different from the musky sweetness we have come to expect of the vegetable.

Notice how much harder it is to follow the sentence without the commas:

Shaved into paper-thin rounds spring beets provide an earthy sharp flavor that’s different from the musky sweetness we have come to expect of the vegetable.

Correctly placed commas help you signal readers where one idea ends and another begins. It can take effort to step back from your own thoughts and ask how a sentence will look to a reader, but that effort pays off in clarity.

Correct punctuation helps hold readers’ attention. It also signals that you respect them enough to communicate carefully by trying to think about how they’ll receive your message.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two full, user-friendly chapters on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Hyphens, Dashes, and Tablet Devices

Write It Well — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:46:26 +0000

Readers can get distracted or confused when business writers mix up hyphens and dashes. The following sentences about the new iPad feature a correctly used hyphen and dash:

Any company that wants to make a tablet computer that matches the iPad’s $499 starting price has to endure higher costs. As a result, Apple’s tablet-making competitors have flailed — and failed.

Hyphens (-) are shorter than dashes (—). Hyphens appear most often in two-word phrases that come before a noun and describe it (e.g., “tablet-making competitors”). Think of hyphens as glue that holds two or more words together, uniting their meaning.

Dashes are different from hyphens in two more ways. Dashes are for parts of sentences rather than individual words, and their function is more to separate ideas than to unite them.

Dashes set off a group of words from the rest of a sentence by adding emphasis. A hyphen with spaces around it can’t stand in for a dash. The result looks careless and unpolished, and it can distract readers from your message:

Apple’s tablet-making competitors have flailed - and failed.

When you want to set off a word group, a correctly typed dash adds polish and emphasis to your sentence.

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The Yelp Debut and Too Much Punctuation

Write It Well — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:17:53 +0000

You might be better off rewriting a sentence if you get confused about how you should punctuate it. Consider this sentence on the Yelp debut:

At an opening price of roughly $22 a share, Yelp is trading at a $1.6 billion valuation — far smaller than some of the recent Internet offerings, like Zynga or Groupon — but still an impressive debut for a start-up operating in a highly competitive environment that has yet to turn a profit.

The sentence is 51 words long. Most business writers find it easiest to follow sentences that are about half that length.

If you find a sentence going over about 30 words, look for a way to break up your ideas into two or three simpler sentences. Here’s one simpler way to rephrase the ideas above:

At an opening price of roughly $22 a share, Yelp is trading at a $1.6 billion valuation. That valuation is far smaller than some of the recent Internet offerings, like Zynga or Groupon. But it’s still an impressive debut for a start-up operating in a highly competitive environment that has yet to turn a profit.

The three new sentences present the same information much more simply by breaking it down with two breathing spaces. The new periods stop readers from having to take in the opening price, valuation, company comparisons, and the final question of turning a profit all in one breath.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on ways you can keep your sentences easy to follow. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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Colons, Capitalization, and the Oscars

Write It Well — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 23:17:12 +0000

It’s more important to use a colon correctly than to decide whether you’ll capitalize an ordinary word that follows it. Here’s an example of a correctly used colon in a sentence about the Oscars:

The awards show is working hard to pump up its social-media clout as it tries to leverage a growing phenomenon: More and more viewers are supplementing the experience of merely watching their favorite TV shows by joining in simultaneous running commentaries on Twitter and Facebook.

That sentence is from the Wall Street Journal site; capitalizing all words after a colon is their house style. Style decision aren’t a matter of correct and incorrect language. It’s only important to be consistent by capitalizing each and every word that follows a colon if you capitalize just one in a document.

The optional capital letter after a colon is a reminder of an important fact: a colon should only follow a word group that could stand on its own as a complete sentence.

Many sentences with colons are longer than the maximum length of about 30 words that keeps it easy for a reader to follow a business document. The quoted sentence above is 45 words long.

If you find yourself asking whether you’re using a colon correctly, just try substituting a period for the colon. It’s always correct to write two shorter sentences, and two briefer bursts of information may be easier for your reader to follow.

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Informal Prose, Cooking Time, and Clean Logic

Write It Well — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:51:11 +0000

Informal business writing can still be crisp and logical; here’s a tip to keep casual writing easy to follow.

This 37-word sentence is by professional food writer Mark Bittman:

My assumptions are that you’re using four chicken-breast halves, about a pound and a half altogether, not sliced into cutlets or fingers or pounded flat but left as they are, about an inch thick at the center.

That sentence beautifully conveys Bittman’s conversational speaking tone. You might want to sound as informal as he does for your company’s blog or your marketing copy. But especially for informal writing, try to keep your sentences under about 30 words.

It’s great to aim for a warm and casual tone, but don’t forget to keep the logic of your sentences easy to follow. If you string your ideas together too loosely, readers may get confused and find something else to read.

Here’s Bittman’s sentence reworded and divided in two, with clearer logic and cleaner grammar:

I assume you’re using four chicken-breast halves, about a pound and a half altogether and an inch thick at the center. Don’t slice them into cutlets or fingers or pound them flat; just leave them as they are.

When you aim for a casual tone, try keeping a sharp eye on how long your sentences get. Short sentences help you keep your thoughts clear. And the more clear your writing is, the likelier you are to hold your readers’ attention.

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Commas, Convenience, and Credibility

Write It Well — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:57:28 +0000

There are rumors that Amazon.com will start selling merchandise at brick-and-mortar stores. The following sentence about those rumors illustrates a common punctuation mistake:

“There wouldn’t have to be any [store] inventory, you would simply play with the stuff, talk to a professional …, and have it at your house in the next 24 to 48 hours,” Jason Calacanis wrote in a recent blog post.

The comma in red makes this blogger’s sentence incorrect. Many readers don’t know the grammatical term comma splice but still wince at this particular punctuation mistake.

Comma splices can lower your credibility, including on blogs and in e-mails, but they’re easy to correct. Just ask yourself if you could separate two ideas into two complete sentences rather than with a comma:

There wouldn’t have to be any store inventory.
You would simply play with the stuff, talk to a pro, and have it delivered.

Since these ideas are full enough to stand as two complete sentences, they need a stronger punctuation mark than a comma to separate them. The handiest solution to avoid a comma splice is just to type two sentences, like this:

There wouldn’t have to be any store inventory. You would simply play with the stuff, talk to a pro, and have it delivered.

As a rule of thumb, if you think your punctuation may be incorrect, try backing up and typing two shorter sentences. You’re more likely to be correct and easy to understand.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two chapters on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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Twitter, Hyphens, and How to Type a Dash

Write It Well — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 01:00:21 +0000

It’s easy to learn when and how to type a dash instead of a hyphen.

Hyphens (-) connect words, while dashes (—) connect larger parts of a sentence. This paragraph illustrates the difference:

Twitter, the minimalist-format social network that claims to have 100 million users, has built its reputation around its simplicity. Members can post to the service only in text messages of 140 characters or less. They can include a link to another site, or to a photo or video. They can repost other users’ messages on their own pages. They can send each other equally spartan private messages. That’s about it — or so it seems.

A hyphen is used most often in two-word phrases that come before a noun (such as the phrase “two-word” before the noun “phrases” in this sentence).

A dash dramatically separates one idea from the rest of a sentence, calling attention to the words that follow it. Before “or so it seems” in the quote above, a journalist uses a dash to emphasize that Twitter has more uses than the obvious ones he’s just listed.

In Microsoft Word on a Mac or a PC, you can use the hyphen key to type a dash:

On a Mac, you can type a dash by holding down the Option key plus the hyphen key
On a PC, you can type a dash by holding down the CTRL key plus the hyphen key

Add a space both before and after this kind of dash, and your prose can instantly look more polished.

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