Why are we so short on business writing skills anyway? Mark Twain supposedly said, “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” Obviously, he was being sarcastic because there’s a lot more to writing than crossing out the wrong words, right? But what? What are we missing? What do we not know? Well, it turns out there’s a lot we don’t know about writing…especially business writing. One study found 26.2% of employers think college graduates have deficient business writing skills—not weak but deficient.[1] As for...
Let’s get to the point: Poor business writing skills are costing businesses billions of dollars. Businesses are paying this high price due to time wasted on many back-and-forth emails, brands damaged by careless content, poor communications that bog down projects, and more. Employees aren’t doing this on purpose! Employees want to be more effective and productive, but if they lack the skills, how can they? It’s in your best interests to help employees improve business writing skills. When you improve business writing skills The...
OK, I admit it. I couldn’t have described a comma splice a month ago. I knew there was a mistake that needed fixing when I saw one, but I didn’t know what it was called. Now I do because I took copyediting classes from ACES. Let’s save you from that same embarrassment, shall we? A comma splice happens when you have two sentences running together as one. In grammar speak, it’s when you have to independent clauses together as one sentence. But I think it’s easier to understand if I say it’s two sentences. If what comes before the...
I’ll admit it: I’ve yet to use ChatGPT. And I am still skeptical that it is going to fulfill all the marketing potential I see touted on LinkedIn. But I did just write an article for a client and was given AI-generated content as the starting point. And below is what I learned during my first experience. I pass this along to help out anyone else who is either a) handed an outline generated by ChatGPT as I was, or b) generating such outlines and giving them to writers to use. Because, regardless of my skepticism, I realize that AI...
Numbers, what…what is this doing here??? This is a blog on writing! Yes, it is a blog on writing, but it is more so a blog on writing well, and that means being clear and concise so you can easily communicate your message when you’re writing with numbers. To be honest, it’s easy to get numbers wrong, and when that happens, our writing and therefore our message is affected. So let’s take a look at some rules for using numbers, plus some ways to make sure our writing is always clear, no matter how many numbers we are using....
Last time, I showed you an example of word puking from a restaurant website. It was a whole lot of fancy words that said essentially nothing that would help the reader understand what kind of food or experience they could expect. This time we have a run-on sentence—71 words—that does say something, but the reader gets lost in it because it is so darn long and confusing. Here’s the sentence, with brand names removed: The auto industry has paid lip service to digital sales for years, but with the growth of ABC’s direct sales model and...
