The power of your pen...

People are moving to digitise more of their lives, yet the way we consume content is still the same. We need to read. Words never die, yet people's attention today is far harder to capture or hold onto.

In this post, I will outline what rules to follow to greatly increase your chances of getting your content read top to bottom. As the great Joe Sugarman always emphasised, keep them moving...

Hemingway said it best

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a computer and bleed.

A great deal of Hemingway's work was devoted to taking his readers on a journey and kept them wanting more.

He did that by following a simple set of rules that he maintained and never broke his entire writing life...

Hemingway was a novelist, though much of his principles can be applied to business writing.

Rules to follow in your writing

1. Use short sentences
2. Use short first paragraphs
3. Use Vigorous English
4. Be Positive. Not negative.

The first two points are already discussed in my earlier article "In writing, kill your darlings".

I am going to focus on rules 3 and 4.

Rule 3: Use vigorous English.

What exactly is vigorous English and how do you communicate that best?

What is meant here is that your writing should always have real passion.

Remove all traces of complacency or vague or misconstrued elements (especially in sales copy).

When you write with "vigour", your writing has punch and a real sense of purpose.

Other ways to write with vigour can be to:

• Keep related words together.
• Express coordinate ideas in similar form.
• Omit needless words.
• Use definite, specific, concrete language
• Put statements in positive form.
• Use the active voice.

The last point here is the active voice, when writing with an active voice,

Rule 4 : Be positive. Not negative.

Here, the writer should be careful about the specific words they use.

Specifically, write what something is rather than what it isn't.

For example, a negative sentence may read like this:

"The response of the sales letter wasn't bad".

To make it active:

"It was a good response rate for the sales letter"

When writing with such definite purpose this removes all equivocation. This changes the tone and gives personality to your writing.

More importantly, it adds more simplicity and ease of reading which is the main purpose of all these four rules.

If you follow these rules, your copy, emails, letters and any other marketing communication you write in long form will have a much higher chance of being read.

Some great ways to improve your writing is to use an application called Hemingway editor.

This application will tell you very quickly whether your voice has a passive tone or whether it is too complex to read.