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Legal Writing

Manage Your Writing

By Kenneth W. Davis

Post Frequency: 2.8/day

Last Entry: March 28, 2011 at 17:03:57

This week: Keep your lists parallel

Posted on March 28, 2011
The most frequent grammatical problem I encounter in clients' writing is nonparallel lists. Here's an example: This item is a complete sentence A noun Ends with a verb phrase The best short discussion of parallelism I've seen was written by...

This week: Be kind

Posted on March 21, 2011
To be effective, a piece of writing must be organized. It must present its information in the order that best serves the writer's purpose and the reader's needs. A friend of mine, Lee Wood, a writer at Resort Condominiums International,...

This week: Take a 24-hour break

Posted on March 14, 2011
According to famed sports agent Mark H. McCormack, "whenever President Harry Truman wrote an angry letter, he would put it away in his desk for 24 hours to see if he felt the same way the next day." Even with...

This week: Disturb the peace

Posted on March 07, 2011
In her book Leadership and the New Science, Margaret J. Wheatley wrote: For a system to remain alive, for the universe to move onward, information must be continually generated. If there is nothing new, or if the information that exists...

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This week: Send fewer envelopes

Posted on February 28, 2011
Suppose that next Monday you arrive at your office and find an envelope from me. Inside is a $10 bill. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the same. By Thursday, you're thinking about me during your commute, looking forward with pleasure to...

This week: Start tough (sometimes)

Posted on February 21, 2011
Mark McCormack, in What They Still Don't Teach You in Harvard Business School, listed what he called the eight "toughest" messages to deliver: This is how you do it. I want to sell you. I goofed. I have some bad...

This week: Write a one-minute outline

Posted on February 14, 2011
When many of us were in school, outlining had a lot to do with Roman numerals, Arabic numerals, capital letters, and lower-clase letters. As a result, when someone mentions outlines, we run away fast. Outlining can be much easier than...

This week: Pack your bags

Posted on February 07, 2011
A writer and reader have to be alike in some way (even if it's just in knowing the same language), or communication isn't possible. They also have to be different in some way, or communication isn't necessary. This week, as...

This week: Have a conversation

Posted on January 31, 2011
In his book The Postmodern Organization, William Bergquist argues eloquently for the importance of conversation in an organization. "Goods and machines," he writes, "are parts of the organization, whereas conversations are the essence of the organization...

This week: Repair--no, fix--your writing

Posted on January 24, 2011
In his book Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith writes: The famous direct-mail writer John Caples once changed one word in an ad--substituting "fix" for "repair"--and increased the response to the ad 20 percent. This week, as you revise, look for...

This week: Ignore the prattle

Posted on January 17, 2011
Natalie Goldberg advises: It is important to separate the creator and the editor or internal censor. . . . If the editor is absolutely annoying . . . sit down whenever you need to and write what the editor is...

This week: Make it "perfect"

Posted on January 10, 2011
This blog has almost completely ignored what I call "finishing": spelling, punctuation, and other mechanical concerns. In my experience, such concerns aren't much of a problem for most business writers. But from time to time we need to listen to...

This week: Take a break

Posted on December 27, 2010
Manage Your Writing is closed for the holidays. You can expect a new post on January 10. Thank you for your support in 2010!

This week: Look smarter

Posted on December 21, 2010
Cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, wrote: If you want to advance in management, you have to convince other people that you're smart. This is accomplished by substituting incomprehensible jargon for common words. For example a manager would never say,...

This week: Go for a Pulitzer

Posted on December 13, 2010
Legendary newsman Joseph Pulitzer wrote, Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided its light. Not a...

This week: Start with a bang

Posted on December 06, 2010
Mark McCormack, in his book What They Still Don't Teach You in Harvard Business School, listed what he called the eight "toughest" messages to deliver: (1) This is how you do it. (2) I want to sell you. (3) I...

This week: Turn it around

Posted on November 29, 2010
Novelist Philip Roth once wrote, "I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again." He was probably talking about sentences like...

This week: Give yourself assignments

Posted on November 22, 2010
In my writing and training, I often talk about the Internal Writer and the Internal Editor, and the importance of keeping them separate. For most of us, that means shutting off the Internal Editor while we draft, so that our...

This week: Use "real" verbs

Posted on November 15, 2010
Look at this sentence: The committee reached an agreement on the project. The verb is reached, but this is not the "real" verb, the action that the committee performed. The committee didn't reach; it agreed. Reached is a "filler" verb;...

This week: Be a great asker

Posted on November 08, 2010
One key to effective business writing is getting your "stuff" together at the planning stage, deciding what you want to say before you say it. Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, in their classic book Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge,...

This week: Revise

Posted on November 01, 2010
Good writing depends on good revising. To many of us, this truth comes as a surprise. Because we don't think of writing as a process that can be managed like any other business process, we imaging that good writers produce...

This week: It's not brain surgery

Posted on October 25, 2010
Novelist Robert Cormer has said, "The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon." This week, as you write, remember that a draft is a prototype, not...

This week: Know your purpose

Posted on October 19, 2010
Thomas W. Cooper has written that Native American chief, actor, and activist Dan George "never spoke without a reason. . . . What was more important than George's words was that such words were born only of purpose. He had...

This week: Find the lightning

Posted on October 11, 2010
Our job as business writers is not to use words that mean the right thing to us. Our job is the find the best words to convey our meaning to our readers. That's one reason why the revision stage of...

This week: Leave out what your readers will skip

Posted on October 04, 2010
In his book The Invisible Touch, marketing expert Harry Beckwith writes: Skip the balderdash, the puffing, the filler. Tell me. Tell me the same way novelist Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty) writes books. Asked to explain why his books were so...

This week: Do it three times

Posted on September 27, 2010
Historian Paul Fussell once confessed: Crappy work I do twice, good work I do three times. This week, just as an experiment, don't just "do" each piece of work twice (drafting and revising), but take a minute or two to...

This week: Lose the powdered wig

Posted on September 20, 2010
An amazing fact about modern business is that some of the same people who like to think of themselves as on the cutting edge of technology still write the way people talked 200 years ago. They choose words that people...

This week: Take the flab out of your end

Posted on September 13, 2010
The ending of your letters and e-mail messages may be the last thing your reader reads, so you'll want it to leave a good impression. Avoid flowery, "rubber stamp" endings like "Thank you in advance" and "Begging to remain yours...

Thanks!

Posted on September 11, 2010
Thanks to www.bestcollegesonline.com for including us in its list of "80 Blog Posts to Improve Your Business Writing."

This week: Watch the borders

Posted on September 06, 2010
Speaker Joe Griffith tells a story of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover: A young FBI man was put in charge of the FBI's supply department. In an effort to cut cost, he reduced the...