Effective Writing for Business, College & Life (Pocket Edition) International best-selling author William Stanek helps you get the Edge you need! Whether we like it or not, writing is a part of our every day lives and to get by you need an edge. Enter Effective Writing for Business, College & Life: the down in the trenches writing resource you need to be successful! Use this concise guide to help you: Write essays, papers, dissertations Create reports, presentations Develop articles, stories, novels Publish digitally on the Internet, CD-ROM and ... [Find out more ...]Effective writing is essential, but only a few of us can truly do it well. Sure, everyone thinks that writing is simply putting pen to paper and make sentences out of words. But when it comes to writing effectively, it is another story entirely. There are enormous differences between being able to write and writing effectively.
Many people write without considerations of their audience. When we hear the word “audience”, we usually think of movies or television shows. But every form of communication has an audience, and it is most important that writers must understand their audience. And write at the reading and comprehension level of the intended audience. Yet even some very smart individuals are not effective writers because they are not writing for their audience.
Say, For example, an instruction manual for how to hook up a DVD player. The writer of the manual, one with knowledge of the workings of DVD player, must realize that the users are the target audience. And in order to communicate effectively with the target audience, a manual writer must make sure the instructions are clear and concise, and be careful not to leave out any steps or assume that the audience should have the knowledge to understand.
Besides not considering your audience, the biggest obstacle to effective writing is editing and proofreading. Many times, writers fail to realize that there could be disconnections somewhere between their thoughts and what is being written. Reading aloud what you have written is vital to effective writing, because it forces the writer to reconsider whether or not the writing is presenting all of the thoughts clearly and concisely to the audence. It is best to get someone else to edit and proofread your writing. Good editors and proofreaders will pick up mistakes that you as the writer will miss because we read what we think we wrote, not what we actually wrote.
If you want to learn how to write effectively, you need to realize that it is about more than knowing how to write or writing with correct grammar. It is about holding the attention of your audience and making the connection with your words.
