Is Your Written Work Worthy of Being Read?

Blog posts, articles, newsletters, and the like that nobody reads are pretty pointless. That’s why you need 10 Rules for Writing To Be Read, from JD Supra, Knox Design Strategy, and Repechage. Here's one:

“Be Useful. Think, ‘What can the reader do with this information?’”

This post will help you turn your work into something that your audience can – and wants to – read. Print it out. Stick it on the wall beside your computer screen. Then follow the rules, every single time you write. You’ll be glad you did (and so will your readers).

Clear Writing Is Clearly Better

Good writing matters, writes Patrick Lamb in Clear writing makes a difference. The easier your written work is to read, the better people are going to understand it. And the better they understand it, the more they’ll be convinced:

“Using 50 readability measures, the study’s authors found that by a huge amount, a more readable, easy to understand brief is more likely to prevail over a less readable brief.”

Read the post. Follow Lamb’s advice on how to make your writing more clear. Your readers will thank you.

Every Profession Struggles with Delivering Readable Content

When it comes to writing documents that everyone can understand and use, it turns out that lawyers aren’t the only ones challenged. It’s a problem plaguing financial professionals, too, say Steve Lipin and Adam Rosman in A Plea for Plain English in Financial Documents:

“As insiders, we need to stop writing solely for lawyers and professional investors (many of whom do not understand this stuff, either) and start writing so that anyone with an interest in the topic will understand the news or information.”

Read the post, and the five-point “cheat sheet” Lipin and Rosman put together for drafting news releases and publicly filed documents. Because they'll help you become a better writer. More importantly, they'll help you become the writer that those in a position to hire you will read.

Write For Your Reader, Not For Yourself

Sophisticated buyers of products and services can generally determine whether to read an article – whether or not it will provide them value – before they invest their time (and possibly money). So why do so many of those smart buyers become irrational sellers when they write? That's the question that Tucker Max asks, and answers, in The One Unbreakable Rule in Business Writing:

“[It’s] because they see their writing, on some level, as a piece of themselves. They think it will confirm and validate their ideas.”

And that’s the wrong thing to do, explains Max, before he describes the process for making your work about your reader. Read the post. Stop writing for yourself and start writing for your audience. And watch them stop ignoring your work and start paying attention.

Your Clients Don't Need You To Explain The Law

Your clients don't need you to explain the law to them. They need you to explain how the law affects their ability to do business. Anything else, writes Olga Mack, Head of Legal at ClearSlide, in The Art and Science of Being Useful to In-House Counsel,doesn't do much good:

Summarizing the news without any commentary is not helpful. By the time I see the alerts I’ve already read most popular newspapers and likely at least browsed the underlying decision. 

Writing about the legal implications of business and political issues is a great way to show clients and potential clients that you understand what they do, the challenges they face, the solutions they need. But you have to tell them what they need to hear. Read the post. And start helping your clients.

Lawyers: Would Your Own Mother Read Your Content?

Is your writing so filled with jargon, so dry, so "cure-for-insomnia boring" that your own mother wouldn't read it? You wouldn't be alone if it were, writes John Byrne in Lawyers: Want Your Content Read? Follow These 7 Tips! Fortunately, you can get your mom sharing your content in no time if you take Byrne's advice. Like this:

Don’t bury your leads or write like you’re getting paid by the word. Get to your points quickly and try your hardest to keep things moving. Oh, and try as hard as humanly possible to leave out the legal jargon, esoteric legal principles and the Latin. Carpe cut it out!

Read the post. Start writing to be read. And while you're at it, would it kill you to send your mother a note?

Good Writing Is Good For Business

While readers may forgive a grammatical error, a run-on sentence, or even a typo, they're likely to find your work less professional, less organized, and most importantly less valuable when they do. That's what journalism professor Fred Vultee found when he asked students to read both edited and unedited versions of news articles, writes Natalie Jomini Stroud in Study shows the value of copy editing. Vultee's conclusion? It pays to spend on an editor:

Copy editing affects audiences' perceptions about the news and their willingness to pay for it.

The lesson for lawyers and law firms is no less powerful, particularly when you substitute "your legal advice" for "the news" in the above sentence. That doesn't necessarily mean you need to hire a full-time copy editor to review your weekly blog post. But it almost certainly means that you should be relentless when editing your work to correct mistakes, avoid jargon, and make sure your intended audience will understand your message. 

Don't let a typo damage your credibility. Read the post, then get out your red pencil and start editing.

Are You Writing for a 4th Grader?

Is your work written for 10-year-olds? Maybe it should be: that's the reading-level calculation of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. And it turns out, explains Shane Snow in Why History’s Best Writers Wrote for Middle Schoolers, that writing at a lower reading level gives your content a higher likelihood of reaching more people.

That doesn't mean that you should be writing for children, of course. Instead, you should strive to make the complicated legal and business issues you cover accessible to a broader range of readers:

The other lesson from this study is that we should aim to reduce complexity in our writing as much as possible. We won’t lose credibility by doing so. Our readers will comprehend and retain our ideas more reliably. And we’ll have a higher likelihood of reaching more people.

Read the post. Make your work easier to read. Your readers will thank you.

Read This To Become A Better Writer

Writing is hard work, but Gregory Ciotti's 10 Quick Tips for Better Business Writing just might make it a little easier. And easier to read. Ciotti has assembled ten practical points for anyone who writes - to demonstrate expertise, to communicate ideas, to tell stories. And everyone else, too. It's solid advice you'd do well to take:

Writing is not flaunting your vocabulary... [It] is not meant to prove ownership of a thesaurus.

Read the post. Then get writing.