Over the years my career has evolved from primarily advertising and sales promotion responsibilities to a point where editorial writing is occupying a healthy percentage of my professional life. This involves both writing and supervision of freelance writers.

I was recently asked by one of my clients to share some writing tips with the other writers. Here are some of them for our June Morsel:

• When you write, focus on the audience. Think of it as a letter to a friend. Set a goal to tell the story in a memorable way.
• Keep the terms simple and understandable. Stay away from “jargon” and “buzz words”. Write conversational English.
• Watch your style. Keep it simple and don’t “show off” your vocabulary unnecessarily. Mark Twain once said “I never write ‘metropolis’ for seven cents, because I can get the same price for ‘city’. I never write ‘policeman’ because I can get the same money for ‘cop’. Simple language connects”.
• Let your enthusiasm for the message shine through.
• The most important sentence is the first one. Reel in your readers out of the gate.
• Unity – one idea per paragraph.
• Coherence – in Latin it means “to stick together”. Make your story flow naturally from one paragraph to another.
• Punctuation can be your friend. Use it properly to add to the quality of your work. Keep a good grammar reference handy.
• Have a thesaurus ready to reference. A good way to bore a reader is to repeat words.
• Word efficiency. Write something. Review it. Then write it again with fewer words. You can do this!
• A story with a ‘human angle’ is usually better. Quotes work. Use them.

Questions? You write and I promise to read and respond.

View previous monthly morsels on our Free Marketing Advice page.