Don’t just use the word “dance.” Put your brain through its paces and make your writing strut, rhumba, rock or cha-cha. Photo copyright 2012 Cynthia Hartwig

When you’re pressed for time, it’s hard to write well. But believe it or not, it’s okay to write as fast as you can, churning out boring, repetitive, and overwritten drafts. Putting words on a page is always the most difficult part. It’s easy to revise them if you know these seven editing tips. They’ll keep you from torpedoing your deadline and boring the reader.

1. Edit for Speed Reading

Simple sentences read well. Write convoluted, wandering sentences, and you’ll lose your readers. Cut a straight path with your pen by shortening sentences and eliminating parenthetical phrases.

2. Act, Don’t Hang Back

Jazz up your writing by switching from passive to active verbs. Verbs will turn flabby writing into muscular prose. If you are on deadline, go back through your document, circle every verb, and see if you can spiff up the action quickly.

3. Adjective- and Adverb-Ectomies

Simplify your sentences by reducing the number of adjectives and adverbs you use. We’ll take ho-hum copy and run it through our Adjective-and Adverb-Ectomizer to clean up clutter and clarify meaning.

4. No Abstractions, Please

People engage with the world through the senses. Adding sights, sounds, tastes, and smells to your writing creates a visceral experience. Identify abstractions and replace them with concrete language and you’ll be surprised how readability improves.

5. Repetition Run-through

Write fast, as we suggest, and inevitably you’ll write repetitively. Find and Replace can help. Use it to remove repetitious language (go for cutting by 25%) and let the meaning stand on its own.

6. Punch Up the Opening

Catch the attention of the reader at the beginning, or the rest of the work will be for naught. We always rewrite our own first paragraphs to make sure the opening answers the promise of the headline.

7. Speak the Speak

Every industry has a specific set of words—a lexicon—that only people working within it know. Using their language when you’re writing for an industry builds your authority. Even if you’re not an air conditioning expert or a diesel-engine engineer, you can build a lexicon of 100 words to join any world. This is how to conquer complicated technology or science writing while building your street cred.

Emily Warn

PS If you’re interested in how we’d edit YOUR work, post a paragraph in the comments and Cynthia and I will weigh in with our best tips on how to improve your writing.

Seven Editing Tips to Make Your Writing More Readable originally published by Two Pens

If you want to find the pinch point between what your target audience wants to hear and what you have to say, try on their shoes and walk around for a while. Photo copyright 2013 Cynthia Hartwig

Guest blogger Michael Shilling writes for Microsoft’s MSN Music and now for Two Pens. Welcome Michael! He is the author of the novel Rock Bottom (Little, Brown and Company, 2009) and numerous short stories.

Communicating is about connecting, yet the number one mistake that social media content producers and creators make is that they treat themselves, not their readers, as their audience. They use jargon only they understand, make references only they will get, and speak in a voice that is clever for clever’s sake. Ultimately, they look inward, not outward, connecting only with themselves and missing out on countless opportunities to grow their brand, their products, their bottom line.

Yes, that’s the pep talk. Now, here are a few questions to entertain and pass along to the people in charge of your social media to get your company audience-centric:

1. What Does Your Audience Want and Need?

Every company has a story, and at the heart of that story lies the audience. Exxon doesn’t sell gasoline – it sells mobility and travel. Microsoft doesn’t sell software – it sells productivity and innovation. In other words, these companies take the tangible product or service they provide and turn it into a broader desire or concept that they can illustrate in narratives, case studies, anecdotes that together tell a larger tale that will appeal to their audience. So, when you’re creating your social media content, ask yourself how you can render that same alchemy. How does what you provide make your audience’s life easier, funner, better?

2. What Doesn’t Your audience Know About your Company that will Surprise and Interest Them and Keep Them Coming Back?

You’re immersed in your company. You live it and breathe it. Your audience? Not so much. But when creating social media, content professionals often assume all kinds of information, knowledge, and perspectives that their audience does not yet have. Chances are high they don’t know most of the things about your company that you take for granted. Brainstorm and think about how you can tell them about all the great aspects of your company in a way that tells stories, entertains, and builds a sense that what you do is indispensable to their lives.

Remember, social media is about reaching out to your audience, not looking inward. Think in an audience-centric way, and customers will send thank-you notes–in the form of following you.

Talk the Walk: Stand in Your Target Audience’s Shoes originally published by Two Pens

Here, @lifeasbros tells us he is looking for an inanimate girl who can make dinner and presumably won’t correct his grammar.

Am I the only one who grinds my teeth at grammar mistakes involving that vs. who? This error crops up all over Twitter and Facebook, and a lot of e-books that haven’t been proofed by a copyeditor.

Did you notice the telltale phrase in my second sentence: “that haven’t been proofed by a copyeditor?” It’s a pointer to help you learn the simple solution. That refers to inanimate e-books not (presumably) animate copyeditors.

Use That for Things (Inanimate) and Who for Humans (Animate)

The easy way to keep that vs. who straight is to remember, “that” is a that and “who” is a person. Life As a Bro doesn’t want a zombie; he wants a red-blooded woman with a heart beat because if his dream woman isn’t breathing, how can she heat up his kitchen?

@kiss_this_sass should have said, “…anyone under 1K WHO follows back!”

Same goes for @Kiss_This_Sass (fun handle, unless you’re tweeting for business). The “Baby Anons” referred to in the tweet are humans who are socially connected enough to be followed by 1000 other humans. Not things.

Why Should You Care About That vs. Who?

Nobody blogs or tweets or writes a book to make themselves look careless, uninformed or illiterate. Keeping your grammar straight is the business equivalent of wearing a clean shirt or a dress that fits. Whether you want to use on or about correctly, or need help remembering the difference between you’re and your, good grammar will always make you look better.

Don’t be that guy. Learn the difference between that vs who.

Cynthia Hartwig

PS If you’ve got any usage questions beyond that vs. who, ask away in the comments and I’ll weigh in with the tricks I use.

Got a Problem with That? Try Who. originally published by Two Pens

A creative or design brief has to reduce all the things that could be said into the ONE SINGLE THING that is most important. Lots of product managers and marketing managers and client types try to wangle two or even three (!!!) points into the brief, as if more is better. It’s not a pig in a poke.

One is the loneliest number because it’s darned hard to reduce all the things that could be said to the one that will make a difference.

Go ahead. Listen to the song. One main thing is all you get to say in any communication.

A design tip for the person responsible for designing the brief: in addition to limiting the maximum length of a brief to one page, I recommend limiting the maximum character count of the creative strategy statement to 100 characters, perhaps shown in 30 point type. A character count will force the author of the brief to keep it short; bumping up the size of the font will remind both creative team and reviewers what the brief boils down to.

Do this and you’ll never have to scratch through a Three Dog Night.

The Target Audience Should Answer The Who

Show the creative team visually who you want to talk to.

Tell Me What’s Wrong

In account executive speak, this section of a design brief is often called “the situation” or “the problem we are trying to solve.” Give your team insight into the customer’s problem and they’ll figure out a clever way to solve it. In my post on how to use Pinterest to write a creative brief, I show the female buyer of Starbucks Via coffee at retail with a picture of a woman standing in front of a grocery shelf of a gazillion instant coffee brands. The problem the packaging had to solve was how to make Via stand out in a sea of choices.
I like the Mighty Diamonds reggae version of Tell Me What’s Wrong.

The Objective or Purpose Says “What Do You Want From Me?”

Every brief needs a simple sentence that tells the team what you want the customer to think, feel or do. It’s almost always an action. In business speak, the objective or purpose section might read, “We want our bank customers to download a new mobile app that lets them make purchases safely online.” I am surprised that I like Adam Lambert’s version of What Do You Want From Me? :-)

End a Design Brief with Support and Sacred Cows

Include all the major copy points, the rational and emotional reasons why your target audience ought to act, along with links to any consumer insight or relevant research. Be sure to spell out what we used to call “sacred cows”; these are the mandatories like “find room for all the affiliate logos” or “avoid wordplay because this has to work globally” or whatever. I haven’t shot any cows lately, so you’ll have to imagine hearing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” with my bucking bronc photo.

I give you my horse since I don’t have a sacred cow handy. Just put in the mandatories in a creative brief and no one will will get hurt. Photo Copyright 2011 Cynthia Hartwig

Cynthia Hartwig

PS I have always admired Bob Hoffman, the Ad Contrarian, and his no BS views on communication. Here’s an example of his perfect brief. Weigh in on what you think makes a great brief and what song titles I’ve missed.

How to Write a Design Brief in Pictures and Songs originally published by Two Pens

Don’t sacrifice the beauty of your writing to publishing like crazy. Photo copyright 2013 Cynthia Hartwig

Frequency Aids Findability

The rationale for publishing 2-3 posts per week, especially if you’re just starting out, is that the more times you publish, the more people will find your blog. It’s the numbers game: the more pages you publish, the more topics you present, the more likely you’ve written about something that people are searching for.

This means you’re opening many doors (entry pages) to your blog. Over time, you’ll experience the “long-tail” effect—-many pages get only a few hits, but the sum total adds up. Your web traffic increases.

Exceptions to the Rule

Let’s say you’re in a field where there’s not a lot of social media hoo-ha and your audience, made up of let’s say scientists, only wants to learn the latest new ideas or trends. In that case, you might only write three to five times per month.

A good example is Real Climate, “a climate blog for climate scientists,” which only publishes, on average, four posts per month. While that’s low, the blog is consistently ranked among the top ten science blogs. It not only summarizes the latest research but debunks the latest myths reported in the popular press.

To help figure out your publishing frequency, make sure you know what your audience wants.

Don’t Over-do It

Unsubscribe is my friend. I often am intrigued by a blog, sign up for their posts, and—wham-mo!—my inbox fills up. If you see a bump in people unsubscribing to your blog, lower your publishing frequency to a simmer.

The onslaught of posts (and advertising) on the most popular science blog, named of all things, ScienceBlogs kept me from subscribing in the first place. Then there were its internecine duels that saw even its bloggers abandoning it.

The Other Answer?

All of the advice-dispensing bloggers always seem to forget one thing—how long it takes to write a post that people want to read. Great writing takes time. But it’s worth it. Readable posts get shared, linked to, printed, and pinned to cubicle walls.

At Two Pens, Cynthia Hartwig and I tag team to achieve this goal. We believe turning out well-written posts under deadline pressure (yes you must publish frequently) happens more smoothly if you collaborate. We brainstorm ideas for posts related to our current goals, which could be anything from writing an e-book on how to write tweets to joining an online debate. Then one of us writes the post, and the other reads and comments.

We pass our writing back and forth until we’re happy, and then we take one more step—we hand it over to our wonderful copyeditor, Sherri Schultz. Since we teach people how to write, our writing better be close to perfect.

Publish and Polish

So are you saying publish as much as you can without writing crap? Not really. I suggest identifying topics that you care enough about that you’ll want to spend the time needed to craft them. Your goal: to get people reading all the way to the finish line.

You can also vary the length of posts to give yourself a breather. We keep our posts relatively short (see Short, Shorter, Long: What’s the Ideal Length of a Blog Post?“) so publishing one or two per week doesn’t seem like an impossible task.

Send us your opinions on what frequency works for you. We’d love to hear about your experiences.

Emily Warn

How Often Should You Post on Your Blog? One Answer You Don’t Often Hear originally published by Two Pens

Online communities form through affinity originally published by Two Pens

Photo copyright 2013 Cynthia Hartwig Museum of Textile Art, Oaxaca, Mexico

If an Idea is Off-Strategy, Stop the Creative Review.

Your first task when judging creative is to make sure the goals of the creative brief has been met. A good brief always lays out the single most important thing that a communication must convey. If your creative team presents ideas that don’t meet the strategy, it’s way less trouble (and less personal) to take the ideas immediately off the table. There’s no point discussing the size of the logo, the color of the graphics or the style of photography. Make sure your creative team understands the brief (this is a good time to make sure the brief itself isn’t at fault). Then set a date when you’ll review the next round of work. End of discussion.

To me, sticking to the strategy is the easiest and least personal way to correct a misfire. Creative people, regardless of their hip ponytails and skinny jeans, are professionals. They know that their ideas have to meet the goals of the brief in an interesting and unique way. If the work doesn’t, believe me, your team knew that way before they presented it to you.

Give Clear Direction on What Works and What Doesn’t.

Assuming the ideas are on strategy, your next task is to discuss what’s working and what isn’t. Creative people love to be told what you like about their ideas. Examples of positive feedback that will endear you to your teams:

“Our customers will identify with the problem.”
“You’ve made a technical product look inviting and easy to use.”
“The product sure looks appealing.”
“Our customers will see how different this upgrade is.”

When you get to the issues that need to be reworked or tweaked, be just as clear.

“This headline is too hard to get.”
“We don’t have a budget for a crowd photo.”
“The word “damn” is out of line with our brand guidelines.”
“The call-to-action is missing.”

Give the team time to respond to your questions or concerns. Once you’ve reached agreement about revisions, recap what you expect and when.

“So we’ll see copy and a new call-to-action by next Friday.”

Do Not Tell Creative People How to Fix Their Work

Creative people love their ideas like their own children. If you want your team to despise you or think about clever ways to stab you in the back, order them to make the logo bigger or to change the color blue to red. When you prescribe a solution, what creative people hear you saying is, “I don’t trust you and I don’t respect your judgment.” Just identify the problem and give them the power (and the respect) to solve it. For example, if the art director’s neon green and hot pink color palette competes with your corporate colors, it’s fair to say so. What’s not fair is to say, “Come back with brown and purple.”

Always Speak for the Customer.

Personal opinions can cause problems in creative reviews. When you’re looking at creative ideas, remember that your own opinions—and those of your peers—are in service to the audience you’re communicating to. Say you’re giving feedback on the music your creative team has selected for a YouTube customer-testimonial video. Which feedback to your creative team is more valuable?

1. “I hate Eminem.”
2. “Most of our customers are female and listen to Norah Jones and Sarah McLachlan.”

Saying No is Never Personal.

It’s a fact of life that even the best creative people misfire. When you see ideas that don’t deserve the green light, don’t ask your teams if they were smoking crack or tell them, “You can do better than this.” Redirect and move on to the next round—unless your writer and art director are consistently coming to you with bad ideas, in which case you have my permission to choose a new team.

Always Thank Your People for Their Efforts.

Creative people spend hoursand hours generating ideas and coming up with snappy headlines and interesting visuals. You should always acknowledge the time, effort and energy that went into the work and how much you enjoy working with people who are committed to great work.

Nike Demands Good Work. So Should You.

When you send people back to the drawing board, you stop shoddy work from getting produced. You may not be “liked” in the short run but you will be admired for demanding great work. Just ask almost any marketing or communication person at Nike. That’s what they expect from their in-house people and all their agency teams.
Nike and agency Weiden + Kennedy “in their cups.”
Larry Asher, co-director of School of Visual Concepts, and I teach a class frequently on Evaluating (and Encouraging) Good Creative Work and you can learn a lot from our systematic method for approving work. And for those of you who need it, here’s a refresher on how to write creative briefs.

Cynthia Hartwig

Some positive thoughts on how to do a negative creative review originally published by Two Pens

Good headlines take time and effort originally published by Two Pens

People who post on Facebook incessantly make us crazy. The only voodoo necessary is to learn how to set your notifications to please you, not them. Photo Copyright 2013 Cynthia Hartwig

I’m not talking about the dings, bells, crickets, or tickety-tocks which can drive you crazy when incoming emails or texts arrive on your cell phone. I’m talking about Notifications on Facebook. If you set them up to your liking, they’ll help you hang out with friends and family rather than with all those people you friended but can’t remember why or where.

Even though Notifications can simplify your life, Facebook makes it less than simple to configure them. I’ll walk you through the steps to define:

1. Which friends’ activities you want to be notified about
2. Where you want to receive notifications (Facebook vs. email)
3. What you want to be notified about (posts, events, Likes, shares, etc.)

Whose Activities You Want to Know About

To identify who you want to hear from, all you have to do is make them a Close Friend. The easiest way to do that is on your home page.  Just click Friends:

In your Friends list, click the Friends box next to their name, and in the menu, click Close Friends. You’ve now knighted them–a gold star appears in the Friends box.

All the activities of your close friends will now show up in the Notification list. Just click Notifications button—the globe next to the email icon in the upper-left corner—and you’ll see what they’re hopping mad about, a baby photo they shared, a party invite, or, or, or…

Where Do You Want to Be Notified?

Are Facebook notifications clogging up your email inbox? You can change that.  Click the Notifications button, and then click Settings in the upper right-corner.

You’ll see the Notifications Settings page where you can choose whether to receive notifications on Facebook, or on email and Facebook.

Click Edit next to Close Friends, and choose On Facebook or On Facebook and Email.

Tell Facebook the Types of Notifications You Want to Receive

Facebook assumes you want to be notified about all the activities of your close friends, but it also assumes you want other types of notifications, too. The only way to turn these off is in your Notification list.

For example, I count Richard Hugo House among my friends but not a close friend. Facebook thinks I want to know about all events from all friends. I don’t. Usually events I get invited to are in Vermont or Tennessee or some other nine-hour plane flight from Seattle.

To turn off types of notifications, open your Notification list, then place your mouse over the x to the right of a notification. Click Turn Off to banish this type of notice. If I do this for Richard Hugo House, I’ll never see a promo for any event. Do the same for any other type of notification you don’t want to receive.

What About All Those Other Settings?

It might take writing a book to explain how to use all the settings on Facebook (we’ll get there) and how they relate to settings for the Facebook app on your phone. Consider this just a starter tip to help you streamline your Facebook life. After all, if you don’t want face time with all your Facebook friends, don’t do it.

When Too Many Facebook Friends Are Crazy-Making, Use Notifications originally published by Two Pens

From the earliest days of pictographs and cuneiform tablets, writers have tried to communicate ideas quickly and visually.Writing content for social media is no different. Photo copyright 2013 Cynthia Hartwig

1. Strong Verbs and Nouns Rule.

The rules of good writing apply to writing content on Twitter and Facebook and every other social network as much as they do to fiction, nonfiction, and essays. Strip out adjectives and adverbs and you’ll save the reader’s time. By making your writing muscular and active, you will drive social narratives forward the same way you do when telling a story.

2. Writing Content Should Educate and Inform.

Solid information your readers can rely on is important. And if it’s tailored to the network you’re reaching, you’ve hit the sweet spot. A post or tweet that sets up why or how the reader will benefit from reading them will always out-poll one that gives you no reason to click. It’s also why a link to deeper and relevant info is the equivalent of the social media monetary system.

3. Visuals (and Visual Writing) Communicate More Quickly.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t stress the importance of sensory writing that makes people see, hear, feel, taste or smell. Fiction writers know the trick of writing with specific and concrete language (think how a good writer uses jade-green or grass-green versus green).

See how the silly visual of the red briefs punctuates this promo banner for a class at School of Visual Concepts (SVC) in Seattle? Never underestimate the power of an image.

The same idea applies to using actual images. It’s a well-known fact that images are shared on Facebook 70% more often than plain text. The numbers are not quite as high on Twitter, but photos, video links and six-second Vine videos are more popular than text-only tweets. We’re a visual culture;images communicate more swiftly and directly what we’re feeling.

4. Writing Content on 1-2 Topics Builds Credibility and Authority.

If you understand your brand and write content within one or two areas of expertise, your following will grow. That’s because people will quickly figure out who you are and where your value lies. Random posting on all kinds of subjects has a beebee gun effect: it’s annoying and not as powerful as consistent, carefully aimed shots.

Jonathan Coleman, uber-content strategist at REI, uses writerly wit to comment on life as a content strategist.

5. Wordplay Makes You Shine.

Good writing gets attention. People who write wittily and can turn a phrase have a leg up on every social medium because they can transform even mundane or banal events into opportunities for fun, education and persuasion.

Colson Whitehead is a master writer who won a MacArthur genius grant. And guess what: the guy’s a master tweeter. No fair!

Read Grow Your Twitter Following with Great Writing About…an Office Vasectomy for more on this topic.

I’d love to see your examples of good writing content—and why you think it’s worthy–in the comments. I will certainly follow you back on your social medium of choice. We writers who care about writing stick together, right? ☺

Cynthia Hartwig

Five tips for writing content if you’re a social media beginner originally published by Two Pens