Writing That Communicates
Do you want to convey original ideas, a fresh perspective, or an innovative approach? Whatever your goal, to persuade, convince, sell, or motivate – clear and concise writing gets your message across.
Effective writing is natural, easy to read, and easy to understand. Build your strengths in clarity, conciseness, organization, spelling, grammar, and punctuation. You’ll express yourself well and gain visibility, too.
Writing is developed in three stages: researching, drafting, and editing. Research involves searching, reading, gathering data, sorting ideas, and brainstorming. Use whatever organizational methods work for you, whether it’s bookmarking online data, taking notes, printing copies, or highlighting text. Keep all your reference materials together in an online file or file folder.
What’s the purpose of your writing? Do you want to persuade, convince, or inform? Identify and understand your audience. Writing that lacks purpose and direction won’t achieve your goals.
It’s helpful to begin with a brief outline of your thoughts and ideas. You’ll need some type of structure or blueprint to highlight your main points.
Write your first draft quickly, capturing your thoughts on paper. Don’t worry about the sentence structure and spelling; these steps are part of the editing process. You’ll organize and reorganize your ideas in the drafting stage, so expect to write multiple drafts. The more you write and rewrite, the more effective your final product.
Give yourself a break between the drafting and editing stages and you’ll view your writing with a fresh and renewed perspective. Fine tune your product during the editing stage, identifying and correcting organizational problems. You’ll trim and substitute words, correct spelling and grammatical errors, reorganize, and make it better, the same way you improve your landscaping by trimming and pruning the shrubs and replacing tired plantings. Meticulous care takes time and attention and is evident in the end product.
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