Tips for great professional writing

Here’s a secret: effective writing opens many doors of opportunity. Your success rate on job applications, your cold sales emails, your pitches to investors — every time you’re asking for something, it better be written well.

Good writing makes you seem very intelligent. It’s that simple. Good writing helps you communicate what you really want to get across.

Poor writing, on the other hand, works against you. It makes you seem sloppy and rushed, and it muddles the clarity of your message. Plus, it makes you look untrustworthy. Spam emails are recognizable largely because of spelling and grammar typos.

Good writing will help strengthen your relationships, improve your credibility at work, and refine the strategy of your projects.

Here’s the bad news: it takes years of study and thousands of hours of practice to become an exceptional writer.

Here’s the good news: anyone can become a competent, effective writer by keeping the following rules in mind.

1. Focus on the big questions

Who — who is my audience?

What — what do I want them to learn? What do I want them to do after reading this?

When — when do I need results by?

How — is there any specific methodology that should be adhered to?

Why — why am I asking for this? Why am I writing this? Why should anyone care?

2. Be specific

If you want someone to do something, be clear and specific. Oftentimes, in an effort to be polite, we skirt around the main point of what we’re asking. Here’s an example:

“We need to take this project into the next stage by the timeline outlined, and possibly move more resourcing to achieve that deliverable.”

Makes no sense, right? Here’s how you’d say the same thing, but more directly:

“We’re late on this project and we’ll need to bring another engineer to meet our deadline.”

Be specific about what you want delivered, by who, and when. It’s not confrontational to be direct about what you’re asking for. It will actually help you avoid conflict in the end, in case your project goes sideways due to fuzzy directions at the outset.

3. Take out small words and fluffy language

“I had apparently woken up at around the middle of the night, kind of hungry for some pizza.”

“I woke up at midnight, hungry for pizza.”

If you want your writing to be really polished, remove small words from your sentences. They slow the reader down and make your writing bloated and boring.

Cramming your sentences with small, irrelevant words may be a holdover from school essays that had a minimum obligatory word count. Good news: you’re (probably) not in school anymore. You’re free to take out little words that add nothing to your message.

4. Focus on the substance of your message, rather than the impressiveness of your words

There are countless “thought leaders” out there who think that stuffing their sentences with buzzwords equates to intellectual writing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Buzzwords and sales phrases are meaningless. They include no specific details about why you have “seamless implementation” or “best in class technology.” They’re all style, no substance. And, they’re asking smart people to simply believe your claims without proof. It’s 2020. No one believes a product is special just because it’s “powered by artificial intelligence.”

If you want people to actually read your writing, have the courage to be honest. To take the grandiose language out of your writing, and just state the simple truth. Make your writing about helping your readers, and not about your thought leadership positioning.

5. Get a grammar plugin

Grammar is tricky. It’s a lot to learn each and every grammar rule, especially if you’re not a native speaker of the language you’re writing in. Just install a grammar plugin to make your life easier.

6. Avoid run-on sentences

Lots of people think their ability to write long sentences makes them not only an exceptional writer, but also an exceptional thinker. “People will see this 50-word sentence and recognize that my train of thought was so incredible, they’ll beg to do business with me!”

No.

Run-on sentences are unreadable, especially on the internet. Keep your sentences under 25 words. If your sentence is creeping above 25 words, break that sentence into two. Your readers will have fewer migraines that way.

There’s much more that could be said about writing, but these tips are a great starting point for refining your technique. Language is the thing that brings us together. It’s what enables us to share information, thereby driving forward human advancement. Language lets us communicate what we feel on a deep, emotional level. And, it’s certainly useful at work when we have to stand our ground while remaining professional.

Writing shouldn’t be a drag. It should be fun and freeing. The best way to improve your writing is to practice. That can be through journaling, writing poems, trying your hand at article writing — whatever your creative inspiration calls you to do! Enjoy the process and don’t overcomplicate it. You’ll get some great results, guaranteed.