Do You Just Happen To Write Items That Matter?

Posted by Shakirah Dawud in Announcements, Marketing & Business, Social Media, Twitter

In my editing life I meet quality control reviewers, non-profit administration, analysts, business owners, PhD candidates… all writers, willy-nilly.

They make life-and-death decisions about entire organizations, determine the significance of scientific findings, catch the eyes of customers, promise value for grant money, and more. And just about all of it has to be recorded in black and white for posterity.

It’s the “posterity” part that tends to get writers of all kinds stuck. You understand that impressions matter in communications–but which impression is the best in your contexts? Which words in what arrangement will give you that coveted result? No matter what you’re writing, you know that once your message is delivered, there’s no taking it back from your readers’ minds. And it has to be exactly right, or you’ve got some explaining to do at best.

But you can’t stay stuck forever. You get the job done using templates, trite expressions, and formulaic jargon because… well, that’s what everyone does. But you don’t always get the results you expect.

You don’t need trite or formulaic. You need customers and buyers to find you relevant to their lives. You need the school to recognize your scholarship. You need people to understand the evidence you present for why a Federal program is worth the people’s tax money. You need grant funding badly.

So I’ve been working with writing coach Michelle Baker, the Corporate Writing Pro, to help you get those things, by tapping the community of professionals-who-happen-to-write-things-that-matter-every-day via a live TweetChat called #WrMatters. Starting this Thursday, April 5th at 4pm EST, and continuing every other Thursday thereafter, we’ll be discussing how to communicate clearly for your purposes.

Starting with Michelle’s Writing Triangle, we’ll break down how to reach your audience, no matter who they may be. We’ll be asking and answering questions like:

• Who do you envision as your audience?
• How do you make that determination?
• Do you have more than one potential audience?
• If so, how do you decide who to write for?
• How well do you know your audience?
• What are some of the barriers to understanding your audience?

Plus, I’ll be satisfying my language geek answering your questions about grammar, style, punctuation, and more. Note: although we encourage creative thinking to solve problems and answer questions, this chat is meant to discuss professional–not creative–writing issues.

Join us this Thursday using any Twitter platform with a search function you can use to find the #WrMatters hashtag stream, or use TweetChat.

Hope to see you there!

Photo credit: Andy Rennie, courtesy Flickr, CC 2.0.

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