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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: Write a one-minute outline

Posted on October 13, 2008
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 that....

This week: Start tough (sometimes)

Posted on October 06, 2008
Mark McCormack, in What They Still Don't Teach You in Harvard Business School, lists what he calls 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: Make it "perfect"

Posted on September 29, 2008
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 the...

This week: What she said

Posted on September 22, 2008
Joanna Young, of the Confident Writing blog, has written a terrific guest post for Brad Shorr's Word Sell blog. Little did she know she'll be, in effect, doing the same for me.But her list of 10 Ways to Free Your...

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This week: Ignore the prattle

Posted on September 15, 2008
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 saying:...

This week: Ask for guesses

Posted on September 08, 2008
In March, I wrote about the use of readability formulas. But there's another tool you can use to measure the readability of a draft--a tool that takes an actual reader into account.This tool is based on the fact that at...

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

Posted on September 01, 2008
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 opportunities to...

This week: Turn it around

Posted on August 25, 2008
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:There...

This week: Start with a bang

Posted on August 18, 2008
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: Go for a Pulitzer

Posted on August 11, 2008
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 bad...

This week: Look smarter

Posted on August 04, 2008
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: Use "real" verbs

Posted on July 28, 2008
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; the...

This week: Sign on for Power Writing

Posted on July 21, 2008
I've just finished reading Daphne Gray-Grant's 8 1/2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better. It's a well-crafted and engaging book, genuinely fun to read. Daphne's method for effective, efficient writing is much like mine. That's not surprising; we've both learned from...

Book signing in Baltimore

Posted on July 20, 2008
I'm in Baltimore, Maryland, this week, conducting writing training for the U.S. Social Security Administration. On Saturday, July 26, from 2 to 4 p.m., I'll be signing my latest book at the Barnes and Noble store in Towson, Maryland. If...

This week: Give yourself assignments

Posted on July 14, 2008
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: Put it in context

Posted on July 07, 2008
Daphne Gray-Grant writes, in the June 10, 2008, issue of her wonderful e-mail newsletter, Power Writing: I recently finished Steven Johnson's fascinating work The Ghost Map, which is the story of London's cholera outbreak of 1854. This non-fiction book is...

This week: Find the lightning

Posted on June 30, 2008
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...

The enemy of good thinking

Posted on June 29, 2008
"Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking." --Warren Buffet, quoted by Stephen Zades in HR Innovator, Nov/Dec 2003, p. 4

This week: Know your purpose

Posted on June 23, 2008
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: It's Not Brain Surgery

Posted on June 16, 2008
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: Revise

Posted on June 09, 2008
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 good...

This week: Be a great asker

Posted on June 02, 2008
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: Consider your reader's feelings

Posted on May 26, 2008
All of us come to everything we write and read as people, with feelings and attitudes. Too often, as business writers, we forget that, thinking of ourselves and our readers not as people but as profit centers or as boxes...

This week: Pay no attention to your thumb

Posted on May 19, 2008
I heard once about a psych-out technique to use if you're playing tennis against a tough opponent. After watching your opponent warm up, you say to him or her, "As I've been watching you, I've finally realized how to improve...

Fifty resources

Posted on May 15, 2008
At Job Profiles, Christina Laun has published "50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers." They're worth a long look.

This week: Do it three times

Posted on May 12, 2008
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: Leave out what your readers will skip

Posted on May 05, 2008
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: Follow SEC guidelines

Posted on April 28, 2008
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has led the U.S. government in pushing for plain language. SEC guidelines advise: Surround complex ideas with short, common words. For example, use end instead of terminate, explain rather than elucidate, and use instead...

This week: Take the flab out of your end

Posted on April 21, 2008
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...

This week: Lose the powdered wig

Posted on April 14, 2008
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...

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