Rethinking the traditional content process
John Refford’s tweets and posts about marketing technology caught my eye before I ever met him. I’m glad that Twitter connected us for some interesting conversations about the intersection between marketing, technology, and investments. At our last meeting, I thought, “I must ask John to guest-blog for me!” This post about content creation is the […]
Keep it short, but mix it up
Short sentences are easier to read. But many of us learned to write long sentences in what Natalie Canavor, author of Business Writing in the Digital Age, calls “pre-20th century writing.” The best writing mixes sentence lengths for variety, rhythm, and better comprehension. Modern and historical sentence lengths Canavor lists the following sentence lengths in […]
Top five posts from the second quarter of 2013
In case you missed them, below is a list of the top five posts from the Investment Writing blog during the second quarter of 2013. The success of “Q&A format for articles” surprised me because I wrote it to satisfy my own curiosity, rather than in response to a common marketing challenge. However, when Ragan.com […]
Don’t hire a proofreader
Don’t hire a proofreader for your blog, says Michael Hyatt in Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World. Hyatt thinks a proofreader will cause unnecessary delays. However, he recommends that you proofread your own work. Hyatt’s advice shocked me. But then I realized, hey, I don’t use a proofreader. I check my work. I’m usually pretty […]
Margin analysis to improve your writing
Like belongs with like in your writing, as I discussed in “Key lesson for investment commentary writers from my professional organizer.” In Help! for Writers, Roy Peter Clark suggests a way that you can analyze and then reorganize your drafts so that your information goes in the right places. Step 1: Print and write in […]