→ The Craft of Writing Effectively
As a follow-up to a previous post about writing, I’ve been meaning to write the takeaways from Larry McEnerney’s lecture on writing.
How often are our words never read? How much energy do we waste to convey our ideas and plans to no avail?
Larry offers practical and applicable advice to make us effective writers!
In a nutshell:
- The goal of writing is to change the way your reader thinks.
- In business, it can be about communicating ideas and plans.
- It’s not about helping you think about a subject!
Good words when writing create tension, contradiction, challenge. In short, instability! Examples include:
- Inconsistent
- Anomaly
- But
- Although
- However
Since instability is what we’re looking for to catch the reader’s attention, we should leverage them to start with the reader’s problem (not necessarily your problem) or a problem about something the reader cares about!
- For the reader to care about the problem, the situation needs to be unstable. So, what you write should move you forward from instability, and not stability!
- Then we need to show the cost (to them) of this instability and the benefits when solved.
Then you move on to the solution (stability).
As a final note: during the thinking process, formulating the problem might come at the end of the process. But, when writing, the problem needs to be at the beginning so that our words will be read!
Larry’s lecture is really enjoyable, so check it out to get the real deal.