At last month’s workshop on writing anxiety and the small steps we can take to get started on breaking through our blocks, an attendee right up front expressed long-held frustrations about the seemingly arbitrary rules that had been sometimes stringently enforced in school. The specific example sparking our tangent conversation was the compulsion to turn hastily-jotted thoughts into full sentences even though no one else was ever going to see what this person wrote in their notebook.
That kind of early training can be the hardest to break, and it might not make it any easier to know that it’s is often misguided (at best) or fully mistaken (more often the case). Remember that one teacher you had that outright rejected submitted work because it wasn’t stapled/double spaced/attached to the rigid four-step outlining and drafting process he’d designed? While those guidelines can be helpful for teaching unfinished minds to recognize and follow conventions, they more often build in deep-rooted anxieties that make those conventions the most and least of our worries.
The good news is: replacing those rules doesn’t necessarily involve a rigorous and thorough investigation of which ones are valid and which seem to have been invented to keep schoolchildren in synchronized step. We’ll certainly talk through some of that, but the first step is actually learning where to look for real, useful guidance.
Most of us don’t practice business writing in school–unless it’s a required part of a higher education degree, our writing training is more often aimed at general guidelines that might fit in most writing contexts. But our businesses are represented by the texts we produce to showcase the, and those texts need to work within the right context for our business audience. In simpler terms: to learn the rules, go look at what’s already out there.
If you think you might want to try a monthly newsletter, set a couple of hours aside to do a bulk reading of all the issues that’ve piled up in your inbox from the related service and product providers already in your network.
If it’s a social media series but you’re barely comfortable on Facebook and terrified of LinkedIn, spend an afternoon looking at the LinkedIn pages from other experts in your field–and experts in the LinkedIn genre itself.
If your marketing team has suggested a showcase series for your employees’ successes, find a few to provide you with a model.
Whatever the kind of text, someone is already doing it in a field very closely overlapped with your own. Reading the text that exists within that space will give you a strong sense of what the rules of engagement actually are. How often does that text use personal pronouns like you or I? How often does it include lists or fragments of thoughts? How long are these pieces? Do they use emoji or other pictograph elements? Is the language full of jargon, or geared for an outsider? Noting these answers can give you a very good starting place, even if your eleventh-grade English teacher might glower at your use of prepositions or split infinitives.
Something Polished 