Write to Sell by Andy Maslen

As I embarked on this journey of writing I asked myself several Questions. Is there a best practice for writing? Are there any do’s and don’ts when it comes to writing? Obviously when we start school at the age of 5 in the UK one of the first things we learn is how to write. How to construct sentences and how to describe certain words. In my 20-year career in IT I have had the pleasure of writing plenty whether it is Guidance Documents or Emails to Customers to explain concepts. So as I started to write in more of a public domain I decided to investigate if there was a science to this writing malarky.

My favourite thing about Write to Sell was how direct it was. No punches pulled. It was very much straight to the point and very simple to understand. The way the book is structured and broken down to cover all the possible bases of writing was good and easy to follow. The book made me realise how I took it for granted that I would start writing without even thinking about what it is I am about to write.

A lot of eye openers that I took away from the book were rather trivial but it’s the trivial things that we tend to overlook at the cost of effective writing. One of those was to plan out what you are about to write. Taking into consideration the who, what and how. Talking of the Who, this was also a eureka moment for me in that we do not think about the person who will be reading what you are writing and instead it tends to be about who is writing the content. This got me contemplating about life itself and human nature in so far that it is human nature to think about yourselves rather than other people. Only truly mindful people will think about others which brings me to the conclusion that when writing one should be mindful.

Within the actual writing portion of the book it busted another myth that I used to employ quite often in my writing. That was the use of complex words. I was very much in the mindset of appearing clever to the reader but it doesn’t really benefit the reader. The book rips up the script about how sentences should be constructed. What we learnt at school is no longer relevant and or applicable in today’s writing. Writing should be simple and easy to understand and digest. There were also valuable tips around the punctuation aspect of writing which I had not considered before.

The Post Writing aspect of the book was also full of gems. The process taken to proofread your writing highlighted key areas that you would not normally take into consideration. Something like this can be the difference between good content and brilliant content. The importance of layouts was also described within the book which is another area where I will be changing the way I present my work going forward. As most of our writing is done using word processers these days, this brings along the opportunity to leverage new tools to aid our writing. I was extremely impressed with the Readability tool. I now find this so useful in helping me to improve my writing too.

It goes without saying that I have tried to use the principles in the book for this blog as well and will continue to use the book as a reference going forward.