Unknown ~ Unknown

These words of wisdom are from the introduction to Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book. He was a wondrous golf teacher. As it turns out, he knew a bit about writing as well.

An old pro told me that originality does not consist of saying what has never been said before: it consists of saying what you have to say that you know to be the truth.

In his book, Rework, Jason Fried of 37signals advises entrepreneurs to “hire the better writer.” His justification for this is simple – the better writer is the better thinker. But the issue is much bigger than writing. How does an employer choose the best employee?

A credential like a college degree used to be a good filter, but not anymore. Standards have dropped and too many people have too many degrees. How many MBA’s does the world really need, anyway?

Smart employers, at the kind of companies everybody wants to work for, pay more attention to what a person has done than the padding on their resume. Writing about a subject, industry or issue not only qualifies as doing something, it immediately shows an employer how you think.

And if you think this only applies to hip software development companies like 37signals, consider that when the National Commission on Writing surveyed 120 major American corporations they concluded that writing is a “threshold skill for hiring and promotion among salaried employees.”

Excerpted from the ebook “Twelves Things They Should Have Told You About Writing”

Twelve Things They Should Have Told You About Writing.

Touching up a review of the new Kindle with special offers.

Rewriting a wikipedia entry on Roald Admunsen, polar explorer.

Rewriting a blog post about software development.

Rewriting the default email subscription opt-in from Feedburner.

Just because it looks like a paragraph doesn’t mean that it has anything useful to say.

An brief introduction to the rewrite podcast.