Here’s a peek preview of the video we’re starting off with…

That well-worn phrase ‘less is more’ could have been invented for writing websites. Short, sharp, succinct and to the point – that’s the kind of copy your users want to read. And, be honest, that’s the kind of stuff you want to find when you visit a site, isn’t it? Not reams of padding.

But the finely honed phrase doesn’t just appear from nowhere. You have to work at it. So here’s my simple, Five-Step Technique for getting the results you want:

1 Open a new page and just write. Anything, everything – get it all out and say what you want.

2 Read it over carefully; get it in order so that the story flows.

3 Now – be prepared to delete. Cut out anything you don’t need: long-winded sentences; vague filler content; repetitions. Check words like ‘that’ and ‘very’ – see Mark Twain’s advice above. If it doesn’t add anything – delete!

4 Re-write wordy cliches like ‘on a weekly basis’, ‘in a position to’ or ‘for the purpose of’.

5 Leave for at least 30 mins (overnight is even better). Then re-read – preferably out loud and with feeling. Tighten up the copy where needed. (Repeat Step 5 if necessary.)

Et voila! You’ll have a lean, mean fighting piece of copy that really does the business.

Remember, you can’t bore people into buying.

That’s before your website goes live. Before that email gets sent. Before your newsletter is mailed out in its hundreds or thousands.

Before any written communication leaves your desk – check it with care.

And that’s because silly little errors – and we all make them – cause more trouble than they’re worth.
They:

• get in the way of transmitting the message
• make you look slip-shod
• lower your credibility
• irritate readers

Creating a good piece of written work is a long journey: re-writing, editing, tightening up, polishing the style. Hopefully, by the time you get to the 11th hour, the major stylistic and structural issues are ironed smooth. Now, you just need to fine-toothcomb to remove the surface debris.

What to Look For

Basically, you’re checking:

• Punctuation
• Spelling
• Grammar, and
• Troublesome Words.

You’re also doing a last check to make sure everything is consistent. Is the company ABC Ltd or A.B.C. Ltd? Do you want to use –ize or –ise?

So, let’s start by jumping in and identifying …

The 8 Most Common Mistakes in Business Writing…
…And they’re all Troublesome Words

It’s (it is) and Its
• It’s winter again, and it’s hell getting up in the dark.
• With its fab coffee and croissants, this hotel almost makes early starts painless.

You’re (you are) and Your
• You’re going to go far, young man!
• When it’s your birthday, you have to bring us all cream cakes.

They’re (they are), Their and There
• You’ll love the people at this networking group because they’re so friendly.
• In my department, they print out their documents and do their proofreading on hard copy, not on screen.
• There are no shy wallflowers in my Latin American Dance Class.

Whose and Who’s (who is or who has)
• Jane, whose copywriting skills are fantastic, can help you.
• Jane, who’s a fantastic copywriter, can help you.

Affect (to influence) and Effect (a result)
• Smoking can affect your health.
• Smoking has a really bad effect on your health.

Imply (to suggest) and Infer (to deduce)
• He implied that I was a fool.
• So what am I supposed to infer from that?

Advice and Advise
• Ask Jane for advice about writing copy.
• Jane can advise you about copy for your website.

Principle and Principal
• The ethical principles are enshrined in the MRS Code.
• Ms Smith is a principal of our business.

So do you check your work before you publish it and send it out into the wild? Let me know in the comments below.

PS: Tips on punctuation, spelling and grammar, coming soon!

And don’t I know it? I’ve just had a really horrid couple of weeks battling with the dreaded WB – Writer’s Block. No matter how enthusiastic I’ve been – no matter how much of a positive outlook I’ve forced on myself – every time I sat down to write something my brain ground to a halt. Nothing moved. All was still; apart from the ideas slipping inexorably away.

Where were all those wonderful phrases, arguments and intelligent expositions that cantered through my thoughts as I lay in bed awake at 2.30 am? All gone.

Writer’s block is a pain and a nuisance and the most effective panic-inducer I can think of. The only comfort being that it happens to everybody. So, how do people cope with it?

To find out – and as a practical exercise in banishing the wretched condition – I Googled around to see what others suggest. And this is what I found.

1   Free-writing

A popular suggestion. Sit down and just write for ten minutes. Write anything – sense, nonsense, whatever. The idea is to write without stopping. If you can’t think of anything to say, one friend says he just writes ‘blah, blah, blah’ over and over. He says it works for him

2 Mind Mapping and other Graphic Organisers

Very useful for sorting out ideas and making sure you’ve got all the information you need. Sometimes when I hit a brick wall it’s because I haven’t got the info, because I haven’t asked enough of the right questions. Simple as that.

(If you’re not familiar with these visual mapping organisers, do look them up. Hmm… could be a good blog post, there.)

3   Don’t even try Mind Reading

This is my insight, sparked off by the last point. I can find myself going round and round and round, trying to double-guess what the client wants to say. Well, STOP! Go and ask! It works.

4   Start anywhere

You really don’t have to start at the beginning, go on the middle and end at the end. A piece ends up like that – but it doesn’t have to be written like that. And a website is very unlikely to work like that, anyway. Start with something you know well, or something that’s straightforward.

5   Remember: ain’t no such thing as a Perfect Draft

Perfection just doesn’t ooze out onto the page at first try. You might have to write something out in a wordy fashion, and then polish, pluck and perfect until it’s as you want it. So don’t wait until the perfect phrase comes into your head. Go with second-, third- or fourth-best, and massage it into shape.

6   Do something different

It’s good practice not to sit too long at the computer, anyway. But when you’ve got cognitive snow-blindness it’s not a bad idea to get up and walk around, have a coffee, feed the cat, walk round the block. Do something physical to break the state.

7   Make it the first thing you do in the morning

If your problem is getting started, put aside the first hour of the day for your project. Don’t look at emails. Don’t make phone calls. Don’t do any of the 1001 other things that just put off that starting moment. (I was going to write ‘the evil moment’, then I thought, let’s keep this positive!)

8   Just write headlines

Forget the content for the moment. Create a long list of headlines: short, long, plain, clever – just get them out on the page. Some you’ll keep; some you’ll turn into subheads; some will have to go. And some will inspire you to start writing.

9   Use a timer

Great tip from Angela Booth in her post Time Your Writing Life: use the Pomodoro Technique: ‘Using a timer stops you messing around. If you know you’ve only got 25 minutes to write something, you get on with it and write, you don’t dither. You’ll find that inspiration happens when you’re writing, not when you’re thinking about writing. Using a timer helps you to show up for your writing – and showing up is all you need to do.’

10 Be calm – keep calm

I know that’s easier said than done, and that looming deadlines are overpowering. But panic just isn’t a great muse. So be kind to yourself. Don’t beat yourself up.

What do you do to get over the dreaded WB? Any hints or tips, just put them in the comments and we’ll share.

I have to confess, right here and now: I’m no natural speller. Other people might be able to spell ‘onomatopoeia’ without looking it up in the dictionary, but not me. In fact, if it wasn’t for spellcheckers and dictionaries, I’d have to go audio.

But unlike lots of bad spellers, I can’t pretend spelling doesn’t matter; because I know it does. At best, bad spelling makes you look lazy, sloppy and careless. At worst, it interferes with clarity (cardinal sin).

So I do my best, and persevere (just had to spellcheck that!). No one’s going to call me illiterate!

English spelling isn’t straightforward and obvious, but if you’re aware of the pitfalls you can learn to avoid them.

Just Look and Say/Say and Write – it’s easy-peasy

If only it were! Unfortunately, English pronunciation and spelling are not equivalent, even though lots of people believe they are. Take my mother: she’s a born speller. And if I ask her how to spell something, she’ll say ‘Exactly as it sounds.’ Very helpful, I don’t think. Might work for ‘cat’, but it sure as apples doesn’t work for ‘cough’, or ‘recipe’ or ‘millennium’.

So – just follow the rules!

Er, right. You mean infallible rules like ‘I before E except after C’? Great – so long as you don’t want to write ‘foreign’ or ‘receipt’ or ‘sufficient’ or any of the other exceptions. And there are a fair few.

According to The Simplified Spelling Society, there are 90 basic spelling patterns and at least 3500 common words that just don’t follow the rules. So we have to learn them.

Like these:

• The long ‘EE’ sound can be ‘seen’, ‘bean’, ‘weird’, ‘me‘, ‘ski‘ or ‘quay‘
• The long ‘OO’ sound can be ‘food’, ‘rude’, ‘fruit’, ‘blue‘ or ‘shoe‘
• The ‘-ER’ ending can be ‘mother‘, ‘actor‘, ‘popular‘ or ‘theatre‘

And then you’d do well to keep your eyes peeled for:

• words with silent letters, eg: gnaw, know, comb, debt, write
• words with swallowed syllables, eg:
every – pronounced evry
Wednesday – pronounced wensday
vegetable – pronounced vegtable

• words that sound the same but have different meanings (homophones), eg:
principle and principal
there and their
cite, site and sight
stationery and stationary

And the Award for Causing the Most Spelling Problems goes to…

Consonant Doubling!

Simple rule: when you want to show that a stressed vowel is short, double the consonant.
So you have ‘bitter’, ‘latter’, ‘rotten’, ‘running’, ‘silly’.

But we can’t follow it all the time. For instance, it’s:

• ‘abbey’ and ‘rabbit’, but ‘habit’ and ‘robin’
• ‘giddy’ and ‘sodden’, but ‘body’ and ‘modern’

And there are heaps of other exceptions! Masha Bell’s English Spelling Problems site lists 379 common words that obey the consonant doubling rule and 376 words that disobey the rule.

So, what to do?

If it doesn’t all come naturally (and why should it?) then try this:

1 Be honest – admit it if your spelling is weak. Erratic spelling does NOT make you a bad person! No matter what your school teachers wanted you to believe.

2 Be aware – learn the words that cause you the biggest trouble. The ‘I and E’ stuff gets me if I don’t pay attention. And it took me ages to learn that ‘amount’ only has one ‘m’. How about you?

3 Be careful – use spellcheckers and dictionaries. If you’re not sure – look it up! Always spellcheck. (Yes – even emails.) If there’s a choice in spelling something – ‘recognise’ or ‘recognize’ – choose one and be consistent.

Remember – If you can’t be good, be careful!

The other morning, I heard myself snapping ‘Fewer!’ at some guy on the Today programme who’d said something about ‘less cars on our roads.’

And it was automatic. He said ‘less’; I came straight back with ‘fewer’, without thinking.

Well, it really irritates me when people confuse ‘fewer’ with ‘less’. But even so… Shouting at the radio is a bit sad.

A few pet peeves
Then I heard another expression that gets on my nerves: ‘On a daily basis.’ I mean, why the ‘basis’ bit? Why not just say ‘every day’? Why sound stuffy and bureaucratic with ‘on a weekly basis’ when you could be far more friendly with ‘every week’?

And here’s another one: ‘In order to….’ It sounds so pompous and impersonal. I could just about imagine it written in a formal instruction manual – yet people use it in speech.

Now, if I were talking to you, which would sound more personal:

• ‘I went to bed early in order to get plenty of sleep’
or
• ‘I went to bed early so I’d get plenty of sleep.’

Whew! Do I feel better, now I’ve got that off my chest!

So, have you got any pet hates? What things do people say that drive you mad? And do you let them know?

Umm… anyone else out there who shouts at radios?

Although there’s a load more to do to this site to make it look pretty, I’m off now to gather up all my old blogs – as many as I can find – and get them settled in to their new home.

My! You’re in for a treat

See you soon!