7 comments

  1. I understand the many benefits of #7. Writing is a craft, so it has to be done regularly and consistently. But I wonder if, in the age of RSS and Twitter feeds, if meeting readers’ expectations for regularity is important? It’s been years since I had blogs bookmarked and would go over and visit them and refresh the page to see if something new had been posted. Now whenever something new appears, it comes to me.

  2. Excellent advise! I would add only one thing: Roget’s Thesaurus, the writing companion that keeps me from sounding stale and repetitive… I think?

  3. Great points, Mitch. I’d add one . Think of telling a story, with a beginning and an end, and with characters. In business writing, we often don’t get a chance to do this, but it’s important to look for opportunities. The business writing I’m proudest of are the pieces that also appeal to non business readers, and they do that by telling stories.

  4. Great article with many points to ponder. I have just started to use Scrivener as I’ve had a book sitting on my laptop for….3 years…but got to a point where I wanted to move the chapters around but it was all in one document which made it a challenge. Scrivener has made that much easier. I also use Evernote to do outlines so whenever I have an idea for a post that may come from #1 Read, I can clip the original article (idea) and add to it over time.
    Did you say, “It’s OK to not be perfect?”…I think that’s important too.

  5. Great advice for student writers and all writers (not just business writers). For long reports and pieces with a lot of data, I recommend mindjet as an alternative to scrivener. Mindjet allows you to attach your notes to each mindmapped point. Then when you download the mindmap to word, it comes out as an outlined document with all the notes in place. It’s quite easy to write final text from those notes.

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