(Also published at Huffington Post.) So far in this series, I've been helping you find out exactly what you want to say. I've argued that getting that right makes everything else easier, faster, and probably better.
Now I'll turn from what to say to how. The first thing to know: give your writing a shape.
(Also published at Huffington Post.) In any one communication, you can only make one point.
Count on people forgetting everything else. That's because our minds throw away almost all new information -- by necessity, since we wouldn't be able to tote brains big enough to store a day's worth. Even the seven digits of a (US) phone number are hard to learn, requiring that we repeat them over and over to get them out of short term memory and into the long term version.*
This is why a good angle -- a simple, emotionally compelling idea -- is so important: if people are only going to remember one thing (and they are), you want it to be the right thing.
(Also published at Huffington Post.) Last time, I introduced the power of a good angle for both speeding and improving your writing. Today I'll go into more detail on how choose that angle. The most important question to ask yourself is the simplest: "What the heck am I actually trying to say?" As, it happens, this also is one of the hardest questions. That's because: (1) You must truly understand your subject. That means work, and (2) You must commit to an idea that may turn out to be wrong or unpopular. That means risk.
(Also published at Huffington Post.) Compared to our pre-digital forebears, we're expected to produce torrents of writing: emails, text messages, blog posts, social media, presentations.
That's because publishing all that stuff is easier than ever. The trouble is, the actual writing isn't -- especially if you care about quality.
"Easy reading is damn hard writing," as Nathaniel Hawthorne said.
So how to write both fast and well?
Also published at Huffington Post: In a meeting of nonprofit leaders the other day, I heard an executive praise some recent work done by his staff as "amazing" and "incredible".
I hear this kind of thing so often that, normally, it hardly registers -- it's become the equivalent of someone saying "thank you".
Here's a great new tool for us creatives - Palettab - available as a Chrome extension. It works like this: Everytime you open a new tab in Chrome, a new combination of color palette and fonts appears in the browser window. If you see a color you like, simply click, and the hex number is copied to your clipboard. All the fonts are available via Google fonts. Simple to install, really easy use, find it here: Palettab
This article is crossposted at The Huffington Post.
Back in 2005, Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat made a persuasive argument that the globe was coming together on a level playing field, thanks to the equalizing forces of technology and peaceful economic competition.
But nearly 10 years later, it looks instead like the world is falling part.
This article is crossposted at The Huffington Post.
A while back, I predicted the coming of no-content marketing: what comes next after the sheer volume of content drives its value below zero. That's the point at which we start paying to avoid content, no matter how compelling, shocking, funny, or celebrity- or puppy-laden.
That point is here.
A long time ago, I had to learn from scratch how to manage visual designers, after having started out as a composer and audio producer, with no training in graphic arts -- back then I thought of it as "the blind leading the deaf."
Luckily, I found that most of the skills I'd developed while working with sound carried over to other disciplines, too. There's one skill above all that I believe managers need to master in order to get the best work from a designer or any creative professional:
Talk about why, not how.
