I hope you find my writing and business tips and observations useful. My business and blog are dedicated to helping businesses communicate clearly and reach their potential.
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Branding is in the details
Branding is a big subject, covering how you use your logo through to how you give a presentation. But did you know that the words you use in documents, on websites and in presentations also form part of your brand?
For instance, if your brand is to be young and funky, you don’t want web copy that reads “In our experience, prospective partnerships are best developed through a commonality of interests…”
Some factors to consider to ensure your written communications enhance your brand are:
- using language to suit the audience you want to attract
- use Australian spelling and conventions if your brand is ‘Australian owned’
- point of view – do you say ‘you’ or ‘clients’?
- how do you write the business name? Can you abbreviate it under certain circumstances?
- the tone – casual, formal, academic, legal
- the focus – business people, families, students, employers, professionals, etc
This can all come into preparing a style guide, too.
Always double-check your writing
Writing well is more than just getting words onto the page – you also need to check the correct words and spelling are there to be read.
I was looking at a website the other day and I’m sure they didn’t proof read it – maybe they didn’t actually read it at all once it was written. On their contact page it states:
Submit your answers and reply or call at no time.
The bit that jumped out at me was ‘call at no time’ – not exactly a welcoming message for a business! The mistake of ‘no’ instead of ‘any’ is simple to make but has a big impact on the final meaning of your words.
Of course, ‘submit your answers and reply’ doesn’t make sense either. Reading over their work (or getting someone else to read it for them) could have ended with webcopy that made sense.
So always read through and check your writing says what you wanted it to say, without missing words.
Writing effective ads
I have seen some ads lately that just don’t do justice to the product/service they are supposed to be promoting. Some are poorly designed so I won’t touch them, but others look great but the words let it down.
The key is knowing the purpose of the ad – is it to get website traffic, explain a new product, attract a certain type of person, increase sales, or …
Once you know the purpose, you can make the headline, graphics and text suit that purpose.
Next is knowing your audience – using terms like ‘lol’, ‘RAM’, ‘html’, ‘ftp’ and ‘ppc’ will work if you are attracting IT specialists but not so well if you are after people in their 80s.
The hard part is then adding enough information to meet your purpose but not so much you overwhelm or bore people. This is definitely the stage where it is valuable to write it, leave it and then review it a few days later.
As well as the above points, you need the basic writing rules, too – good spelling, correct grammar and an easy-to-read format and style. Put it all together and your ads will be much more effective than the ones I mentioned earlier.
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs
Do names matter?
When writing, the other important aspect about names is spelling.
If you are writing a note to yourself, obviously the spelling is less important. But as soon as you are writing something for a business use, it is essential you spell names correctly. That includes the names of your colleagues and competitors as well as clients, and also any business names you refer to.
Taking the time to get someone’s name spelt correctly in your records can save you time and the embarrassment of getting it wrong later.
You may not like the spellings emma-lee, elisabeth or mishell, but if that is how someone spells it, that is the way you need to spell it when refering to that person.
Getting it right shows respect; getting it wrong will annoy or even insult the person you are writing about, and can even lose you sales.
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs
Style Sheets
Business writing, well good business writing, is made up of a lot of elements. One important element that isn’t mentioned very often is consistency.
While consistency in style, design and so forth are important, I am talking about consistency within the content itself.
It can be consistency in spelling (advisor or adviser?), capitalisation (Internet or internet?), hyphenation (multi-media or multimedia?), abbreviations (A.T.O. or ATO?) or apostrophes (CDs or CD’s?) Sometimes there is a right or wrong way, but in other cases either way is acceptable. However, switching between them in the same document or on your website can be distracting and even annoying. It also doesn’t send a good message about your attention to detail.
Let’s take the example of adviser and advisor. Both are acceptable spellings of the word, although some dictionaries list advisor as the American spelling; adviser tends to be more common in Australia.
If you are writing a webpage about your services as a business adviser, it is likely you would write adviser quite a few times. And by the time you have written the entire website, you will probably have used adviser at least a dozen or so times.
Now, if you have a strong preference for writing adviser, it will be easy and you probably wrote adviser every time. Likewise if you prefer advisor.
But what if you can never remember which is the ‘right’ way? Or you prefer adviser but whoever wrote the older webpages used advisor and it’s hard to remember which to use.
How can you remember which way to spell adviser? And at the same time remember to keep everything else consistent?
One way is to prepare yourself a style sheet.
How does a style sheet work?
Your style sheet can simply be a list of things to watch out for, or it can be a grid with each square being a letter of the alphabet so you can sort the things to watch out for.
An example style sheet is:
Style Sheet for Word Constructions Blog
Adviser
CDs
database
e.g.
internet
multimedia
program
Next time I need to write about a multimedia program within my blog, I just check that style sheet for the appropriate spelling.
Style sheets can be particularly useful if you have more than one entity to write about. You might have a style sheet for your job and another one for your own business, or maybe you need a style sheet for each client.
Company and product names can also be included in a style sheet as getting these names correct is an important part of branding.
The time it takes to create a style sheet will be paid for by having greater consistency in your writing. And a style sheet makes a great starting point for a style guide later on.
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