How To Say Nothing In 500 Words<\/em>\u00a0is still available\u00a0as PDF, but it\u2019s quite a bit to read.<\/p>\nUnfortunately Maki\u2019s original post is unavailable since he pulled the site down. Fortunately through some web archive sleuthing I was able to find a copy of the original tips.<\/p>\n
I originally just wanted to share these with a friend, but figured why not share with all of you. Original credit for summarizing goes to DoshDosh.com, which we\u2019ll link to as credit if the site is brought back up.\u00a0But the tips are too good not to have published somewhere.<\/p>\n
The web has, if anything, set the written word on fire and despite the proliferation of video text continues to be the world\u2019s dominant content format. Quality writing is a rare and valuable skill that helps media spread ideas,\u00a0amplifies\u00a0a company\u2019s ability to sell products and enables professionals of all variety\u00a0to be persuasive.<\/p>\n
Keep these tips in mind as when\u00a0every company is a media company, effective writing rules.<\/p>\n
9 definitive tips for effective writing:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n- Avoid the obvious content.<\/strong>\u201cSay the assignment is college football. Say that you\u2019ve decided to be against it. Begin by putting down the arguments that come to your mind. Now when you write your paper, make sure that you don\u2019 t use any of the material on this list. If these are the points that leap to your mind, they will leap to everyone else\u2019s too. Be against college football for some reason or reasons of your own. If they are keen and perceptive ones, that\u2019s splendid. But even if they are trivial or foolish or indefensible, you are still ahead so long as they are not everybody else\u2019s reasons too.\u201d<\/li>\n
- Take the less usual side<\/strong>. \u201cOne rather simple way of getting into your paper is to take the side of the argument that most of the citizens will want to avoid. They are intellectual exercises, and it is legitimate to argue now one way and now another, as debaters do in similar circumstances. Always take the side that looks to you hardest, least defensible. It will almost always turn out to be easier to write interestingly on that side.\u201d<\/li>\n
- Slip out of abstraction<\/strong>. \u201cLook at the work of any professional writer and notice how constantly he is moving from the generality, the abstract statement, to the concrete example, the facts and figures, the illustrations. For most the soundest advice is to be seeking always for the picture, to be always turning general remarks into seeable examples. Don\u2019t say, \u201cSororities teach girls the social graces.\u201d Say, \u201cSorority life teaches a girl how to carry on a conversation while pouring tea, without sloshing the tea into the saucer.\u201d<\/li>\n
- Get rid of obvious padding.<\/strong>\u00a0\u201cInstead of stuffing your sentences with straw, you must try steadily to get rid of the padding, to make your sentences lean and tough\u2026 You dig up more real content. Instead of taking a couple of obvious points off the surface of the topic and then circling warily around them for six paragraphs, you work in and explore, figure out the details. You illustrate.\u201d<\/li>\n
- Call a fool a fool<\/strong>. \u201cIf he was a fool, call him a fool. Hedging the thing about with \u201cin-my-opinion\u2019s\u201d and \u201cit-seems-to-me\u2019s\u201d and \u201cas-I-see-it\u2019s\u201d and \u201cat-least-from-my-point-of-view\u2019s\u201d gains you nothing. Delete these phrases whenever they creep into your paper. Decide what you want to say and say it as vigorously as possible, without apology and in plain words. Writing in the modern world, you cannot altogether avoid modern jargon. But you can do much if you will mount guard against those roundabout phrases, those echoing polysyllables that tend to slip into your writing to rob it of its crispness and force.\u201d<\/li>\n
- Beware of Pat Expressions<\/strong>. \u201cOther things being equal, avoid phrases like \u201cother things being equal.\u201d Those sentences that come to you whole, or in two or three doughy lumps, are sure to be bad sentences. They are no creation of yours but pieces of common thought floating in the community soup\u2026 No writer avoids them altogether, but good writers avoid them more often than poor writers.\u201d<\/li>\n
- Colorful Words<\/strong>. \u201cSome words are what we call \u201ccolorful.\u201d By this we mean that they are calculated to produce a picture or induce an emotion. They are dressy instead of plain, specific instead of general, loud instead of soft. Thus, in place of \u201cHer heart beat,\u201d we may write, \u201cher heart pounded, throbbed, fluttered, danced.\u201d Instead of \u201cHe sat in his chair,\u201d we may say, \u201chelounged, sprawled, coiled<\/em>.<\/strong>\u201d<\/li>\n
- Colored Words.<\/strong>. \u201cWhen we hear a word, we hear with it an echo of all the situations in which we have heard it before. The word\u00a0mother<\/em>, for example, has, for most people, agreeable associations. When you hear\u00a0mother<\/em>\u00a0you probably think of home, safety, love, food, and various other pleasant things..The question of whether to use loaded words or not depends on what is being written.\u201d<\/li>\n
- Colorless Words<\/strong>. \u201cA pet example is\u00a0nice<\/em>, a word we would find it hard to dispense with in casual conversation but which is no longer capable of adding much to a description. Colorless words are those of such general meaning that in a particular sentence they mean nothing\u2026Slang adjectives like cool (\u201dThat\u2019s real cool\u201d) tend to explode all over the language. They are applied to everything, lose their original force, and quickly die.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In September of 2008, then popular blogger Maki who wrote (the now defunct) DoshDosh.com pulled bits from a fantastic essay … <\/p>\n
Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz","category-digital-marketing-and-pr","resize-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":429,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions\/429"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}