Legal Writing

Playwright Neil Simon has written, "In baseball, you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball."

OK, we business writers can't always take as many swings as we want. But we can almost always take more than we think we  can. Isn't that important e-mail message worth another five minutes of your time? If so, don't click "Send" as soon as you've drafted it. Keep it for a few minutes, or a few hours. (One trick is to not fill in the "To" line until after you've revised. That'll keep an unrevised draft from getting away from you.) Then come back and spend five minutes on it. Maybe do that again. Maybe again.

This week, take as many swings as you need to hit the ball out of the park.