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.

Have you read these?

A smattering of interesting and relevant posts from the blawgosphere and beyond

• “Scitable – Velvet Rope and a Stethoscope” from Chris Brogan’s Community and Social Media blog. Our last post featured a piece by Kevin O’Keefe on gated online legal communitites, so when I saw this post from Chris Brogan, a review of what he calls a “velvet rope social network,” I had to include it. Read it to find out Brogan’s take these communities. The bonus? Scitable – check it out.
  
  
• “Change or Die: Reflections on Richard Susskind's ‘The End of Lawyers?’” from The AmLaw Daily. Yes, Richard Susskind’s vision of the future, The End of Lawyers? has been written about more times over the past few months than just about any other subject involving the legal profession (save, of course, layoffs and related news). That doesn’t mean you should skip this post from Michael Stern, newspaper reporter turned BigLaw partner. Why? Precisely because Stern is a BigLaw partner, who sees the world changing around him as he searches for new paths to success. But don’t take my word for it. Take Bill Henderson’s (yes, that Bill Henderson): “Michael… your review and additional insights are excellent.”
  
  
• “Who are you looking at?” from Enlightened Tradition. “Why do law firms find it so hard to ignore their competitors?” asks Mark Gould, who has put together a thoughtful analysis of how this attitude (obsession?) influences the decisions and decision-making process of lawyers and law firms. Virtually every lawyer will have similar stories to those Gould cites, but few will have drawn the same conclusions (and even fewer will have acted on those conclusions). Read it. You’ll be glad you did.
  
  
• “Spend wisely” from Law21.ca. Another great post from Jordan Furlong (are there any other kinds?), which looks at the current state of the legal profession from the perspective of the consumers of legal services, both corporations and individuals. How do the wants and needs and fears and misconceptions of the buyers influence the menus of the sellers? And what does that mean for the profession and its future?
  
  
• “Breakdown: The Five Ways Companies Let Employees Participate in the Social Web” from Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang. Companies need social media policies. More importantly, they need to be aware of what their employees are doing / could do / might do on Web 2.0 sites, and develop some guidelines for that activity that may help avoid unpleasant surprises in the future. Law firms are no different. If you haven’t given a lot of thought to your policy, you’ll find this post useful. (PS: you’ll find it useful even if you already have social media guidelines for your employees. Really.)

Have you read these?

A smattering of interesting posts from the blawgosphere and beyond

• “Welcome to the Future: A View From the Left Coast” posted by Paul Lippe on The AmLaw Daily. In this interview David Baca and Mark Usellis, Chairman and CMO of Davis Wright Tremaine, make very interesting points as they discuss positioning their firm for the future.
  
  
• “In Praise of the Un-Conference” from Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites. This sounds like a great way to run a seminar. It might be too unstructured for lawyers used to giving a standard Powerpoint presentation to nameless participants, but it’s easy to see how much value attendees and speakers alike could gain from this format. What’s keeping you from trying it?
  
  
• “Top 15 newspaper sites of 2008” from Nieman Journalism Lab. The face of journalism is changing. Fast. What it will look like once the dust settles is anybody’s guess, but it’s not hard to imagine situations in which free speech could suffer (see, e.g., “When no news is bad news”). So it’s both encouraging and perplexing to see how many unique visitors the top 15 newspaper sites had in 2008. Where’s the disconnect, and how can the industry fix it?
  
  
• “The rational marketer (and the irrational customer)” from Seth Godin’s blog. Seth’s posts always give me ideas about how lawyers can market their services better, and this one is no exception. You know that your firm, your model, your practice scope and your geographic breadth are better than that of your competition. You know why your client should hire you and your colleagues to do their work. You know it so well that you can’t believe they don’t know it too. But your client doesn’t care about any of those things. She only cares about what’s in it for her. Don’t sell what you’ve got. Sell what the client needs.
  
  
• “Does Creativity Still Matter?” from The Toad Stool by Alan Wolk. Why do I like the post? For this: “perhaps the most important thing good creative can do is make us feel even better about products we already like.” Lawyers, this will make sense to you if phrased this way: “perhaps the most important thing good service can do is make your clients feel even better about having hired you.” OK, maybe it’s a stretch, but that’s how my mind works. Read the post. You’ll learn something.