SEO like I am 5 book by Matthew Capula from NYU Takeaways
● Millions of PhD’s are tuning the google’s ranking, so you can’t cheat them.
○ Instead put the customer first by creating a unique quality of content first, to get
ahead.
● Changes in Google’s algorithm:
○ hummingbird.
○ pandas link stuffing ont work.
○ Be spam free.
● 5C of content marketing.
○ Content offence. Content is king.
○ Code defense. Meta Tag optimization.
○ Credibility special team. Be worth talking about to get backlinks
○ Connections coaching staff. Use social media to establish connections with
experts and influencers.
■ Publish content on slide share, reddit, medium => be question oriented
and find what questions others asked and then answer them. You can
backlink your contents in your answer.
○ Cash GM. Put users first but identify monetization strategies. Collect leads.
● Important rule: Law of reciprocity.
● Use tools:
○ Hosting and domain - godaddy (use coupon)
○ Website and platform - wordpress with Yoast plugin for SEO tags.
○ email: AWaber (email opt in)
○ Analytics: use Google Analytics (ROI) - measurement, track videos.
■ Sync it with webmaster, and google keyword.
○ Webmaster - Google & Bing
■ Check any errors such as broken link, 404 errors, 301 redirect
■ Test site usability on desktop and mobile
○ SumoMe: WordPress Plugin Powerpack. provides a suite of social media,
lead generation, and content marketing plugins for WordPress and other
platforms.
○ Scrollbox (https://sumome.com/app/scroll-box). Email is still a highly effective
tool to grab more leads, communicate with customers, and get the word out
about your latest product. Scroll Box provides a quick and easy solution.
○ Share (https://sumome.com/app/share) is a floating social media plugin that
travels with you as you scroll through the content on a web page.
○ Highlighter (https://sumome.com/app/highlighter). Designed to encourage
sharing on Twitter, Highlighter lets readers easily select portions of your article to
share as quotes on Twitter or Facebook.
○ Image Sharer (https://sumome.com/app/image-sharer). After you install the
Image Sharer plugin (it takes about 30 seconds), all photos on your website will
automatically get professionally overlaid social sharing icons for Pinterest,
Facebook, and Twitter
○ Content Analytics (https://sumome.com/app/content-analytics). What
content the users are reading on your page
○ Heat Maps (https://sumome.com/app/heat-maps). Where users click.
● Content marketing:
○ Data driven performance based coupling
○ Create content and make it discoverable
○ Use hootsuit and Buffer for scheduling
○ Do guest blogging over the web
○ Have a story to tell - differentiate
○ Start with: cause, idea, trender, unique subject you know
○ Create native content and social connections for credibility
○ Humanize your brand by story telling
● You need to have 3 main things for success:
○ Great, compelling, and relevant content.
○ Authenticity, originality, and uniqueness.
○ Native to the platform.
● Articulate why you are unique.
● Every day read from great bloggers.
Content Marketing vs Content Strategy
● Content marketing: baking a cake for a party to attract and engage with your cake.
Deliver the cake.
○ Evaluate the performance of your cake via feedback seeing if it disappears or left
untouched.
● Content Strategy: like running a bakery.
○ Create and planning a scalable and repeatable content, build audience.
○ Targeting niche audiences and topics.
○ Contents should be link worthy and share worthy.
○ Cakes are ebooks, youtube podcast, blog posts
○ You need to manage inventory of what type of content to bake more of
○ What doesn’t sell and what people ask for?
○ You need to have healthy heartbeat => slow and consistent beat and rest.
■ Never stop beating.
■ Always on content marketing operations.
■ Steady flow
■ Provocative conversation on social media
● Use scheduling tools: hootsuit & buffer.
○ Sharable content - blog post
○ Microcontent and Macro content:
■ Daily: Share industry news and trends every day in your social media
channel.
■ Weekly: blog posts, graphics, memes, and videos.
■ Monthly: marketing campaign, the launch of a new product, an ebook, or
a white paper. Publishing branded content or hiring PR agencies
● As you grow your writing skills, consider e-books, guides, and guest posting on online
publications.
● Source and co-create content through interviews, Q&As, curation, and reblogging.
(More on those tactics later in this section.)
● Video content:
○ Video strategies include getting in front of the camera and talking about a
particular topic, recording screencasts and webinars, conducting interviews and
Google+ Hangouts, and creating animated videos
○ If you are not great in front of the camera, hire an actor. You can find plenty of
amateurs who will record a video for you for $5, using sites like Fiverr
(http://www.fiverr.com). Just send them a script with what to say
● Photo content:
○ If you are a skilled photographer, consider using Pinterest, Flickr and
Instagram to expand your blogging presence.
○ Here is a good photo content hack: #1 Just walk around your city, or, when
you travel, take pictures of the things that inspire you with your high-res
smartphone camera. Upload the photos you like to Imgur.com,
(http://imgur.com) an image hosting and sharing platform.
○ #2 Use your own image bank for other forms of content you put out, such as
decks, blog posts and on social media. If others use your content, track them
down and ask for credit with a backlink to your site.
○ Use photo-sourcing tools such as PhotoPin (http://www.photopin.com) to find
free images for your content.
○ Always give credit to the photographer/author following the instructions on
the site. That’s how a content creator gets a credit (and a link); failing to provide
credit is stealing.
○ you can use on your blog is Wikimedia Commons
(http://commons.wikimedia.org) , the web's free media repository
● Audio Content Tools:
○ Consider publishing podcasts, using tools like Stitcher and iTunes for delivery
○ A good podcasting hack is to use tools such as SpeechPad
(https://www.speechpad.com) to get a transcript of your audio content for a
small fee so that you can turn it into blog post content.
○ You can do a Skype or Google Hangout interview for video content, use it on
iTunes as audio content, and finally use it on your blog as text content.
○ Clubhouse
● Graphic Content tools:
○ Memes work well on Reddit and Infographics do well on Visual.ly.
○ You can use plenty of low-cost graphics sourcing tools, such as Elance.com
or 99Designs.com. My personal favorite is Fiverr.com, where you can buy
graphic gigs for as low as $5
○ For $5 you will not get the creative brief; only the execution. So make sure you
clearly explain what you want in advance
○ use Canva (https://www.canva.com) a lot, and created a bunch of graphics for
this book using this tool. It’s awesome. You get hundreds of free templates you
can easily customize to create awesome content
○ use MemeGenerator (http://memegenerator.net) for all memes
● Spam Warning: Do not use any of the $5 SEO gigs on Fiverr. Most of these gigs are
garbage that can do more harm than good, and are what I refer to in this book as the
Bad and the Ugly of SEO (i.e black hat techniques and spam). You do not, and cannot,
buy hundreds of quality backlinks for $5
● Instead, develop a creative brief and ‘gig it out 'to the crowd on Fiverr. If you are a
bigger brand, you can also use SpringLeap.com, a creative crowdsourcing
marketplace for Fortune 500 brands.
● Infographic toolbox:
○ Easel.Ly (http://www.easel.ly) is a theme-based web app for creating data
visualizations and graphics.
○ Piktochart (http://piktochart.com) is a simple and intuitive online tool for
creating high-resolution infographics and charts as part of any web marketing
strategy
○ Visual.ly (http://visual.ly) is an online platform for creating infographics and
diagrams that integrate seamlessly with social networks. They offer a community
Marketplace that connects designers and motion graphics artists who
specialize in the development of more customized infographics.
○ Infogr.am (https://infogr.am) is a web-based tool with a user-friendly interface
and a selection of great pre-designed themes for creating charts using real
data.
● Repurposing involves taking one type of content and transforming it into another form
○ For example, if you create a video, have it transcribed into a blog post. Or if
you create a blog post, turn it into a script that can form the basis of a podcast. I
use SpeechPad for my transcripts.
● rooted in the principle of compounding. Here’s my game plan:
○ #1 Blog content, interviews, guest posts
○ #2 Free e-books and guides #3 Amazon Kindle e-books
○ #4 Paperback Books
○ #5 Audio Books
○ #6 Classes on Udemy
○ #7 Paid speaking engagements
○ #8 Consulting gigs
● You Need Data-Driven Content Marketing
○ Measure and test everything
● According to author and non-profit social media expert Beth Kanter: Content curation is
the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it
in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme [like museum explainer of
painting]
○ “Curation comes up when search stops working. Curation comes up when
people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about
synchronizing a community
○ Step1 : Content Aggregation involves collecting content that is relevant to your
brand or the brand themes created.
○ Step 2: Content Selection involves sorting through the content that has been
collected by analyzing and selecting the best and most relevant content that can
be used according to your brand or brand themes.
○ Step 3: Content Contextualization involves showcasing the best ‘golden
nuggets’ of content to your audience in a format they can easily digest
● Content curation tools:
○ BagTheWeb (http://www.bagtheweb.com) helps users curate Web content
○ List.ly (http://list.ly/) helps bloggers and brands curate, crowdsource, and engage
readers via live embedded content inside blog posts.
○ Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it) lets professionals share important ideas with the
right audiences, giving them an opportunity to create and maintain a meaningful
Web presence.
○ Curata (http://www.curata.com) lets you easily find, organize, and share relevant
content for your business.
○ Storify (https://storify.com) helps to make sense of the content people post on
social media. You can curate the most important voices and turn them into
stories.
○ Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/en) provides a real-time social dashboard
● Measurement:
○ Traffic. How many people read your article (page views)? How long did they
spend on it (longer usually equals better). Did they “bounce” back or go forward
into your site?
○ Audience. Are people following what you post? Do they like it? Do they forward
(Retweet) it?
○ Community. How engaged is your online community with what you post? Does
your content stimulate discussions, comments, and perhaps even mashups and
other instances of UCG (User-Generated Content)?
○ Leads. Are people interested enough in your professional opinion and
credentials to actually ask you to help them with a business problem.
○ Transactions. If you’re selling goods and service online, you’ll know whether
your content is stimulating orders and sales by examining your ecommerce or
other sales metrics. How many of your customers or clients came through
organic search channels?
● Creating a Killer content strategy:
○ What are your content goals? Do you want more conversions, more social
engagement, or more links?
○ Who is your audience? If your goal is to increase conversions, then you must
write for your specific audience.
■ User Personas: Whom Are You Marketing to?
■ Build archetypes and segments
○ Who will develop your content for you? Will you do it yourself, delegate it to
your employees, or outsource the process?
○ How often do you want to publish new content? And do you have the
resources to fulfill the commitment to daily blog posts, weekly podcasts, or
monthly videos?
○ How will you promote your content to reach a targeted audience? Will you
depend on organic social reach, pay for advertising, or dedicate time to blogger
outreach?
○ How will you measure your results to ensure that your content strategy is
meeting your goals?
● Spider method (Xmind tool) mind map creation:
○ What are we trying to achieve with this content? Start with the end goal in
mind. For us it’s primarily more leads.
○ How do we get more leads? We need people to sign up for our newsletter so
that we can start them travelling through the sales funnel.
○ How do we get people activated in the sales funnel? We need them to
download something of value.
○ What is the best way to provide something of value? A white paper or
e-book.
● Pro Tip: Take a few minutes to research the authority of your bloggers and influencers
by looking at their social media profiles, blogs, and/or website ranking on
Alexa.com. You want to make sure that you are choosing people with a broad reach in
order to expand your visibility.
○ The next step: Use designing tools like Canva and PicMonkey, and create
quotes.
● Last we have the Infographics track. Again, no real design skills are needed. You can
use simple-to-use infographic generators, such as Vizualize, Eazel.ly or Piktochart,
to create powerful infographics for your content
● 1 0 Habits of Rock Star Bloggers
○ #1 Rock star bloggers chase their passions, not dollars.
○ #2 Rock star bloggers believe in themselves.
○ #3 Rock star bloggers play the long-term game.
○ #4 Rock star bloggers embrace failure as a part of the process.
○ #5 Rock star bloggers are more interested in others than in themselves.
○ #6 Rock star bloggers are very hard workers.
○ #7 Rock star bloggers respond to every tweet and comment.
○ #8 Rock star bloggers are relationship builders.
○ #9 Rock star bloggers are empirical.
○ #1 0 Rock star bloggers constantly read, learn, test, and experiment.
● It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
○ Constantly consume massive amounts of information related to your
passion.
○ Identify the best sources of information and be the first to know.
○ Find people who accomplished success doing what you want to do and
emulate them. [benchmarks]
● Other suggestions:
○ Take successful baby steps.
○ Monetize after hitting the basics
○ Frequency matters, but only if the content is good.
○ Rock star bloggers chase their passions, not dollars.
● Writing Magnetic Headlines:
○ Use power verbs. Start titles with strong action verbs such as “Read,”
“Download” or “Learn.” Action verbs can be visualized and acted upon easily
○ Employ colorful adjectives. Colorful adjectives magnetically attract eager
readers to your titles by appealing to the imagination
○ Arouse curiosity.
○ Build lists (always). Sharing 11 tips or 8 steps to solve a particular problem
draws readers in because they expect to find practical answers to their specific
questions.
○ Use ‘magic’ words. “Quick,” “Easy,” and “Simple” are the magic headline words
guaranteed to boost clicks pronto.
○ Pick up the paper [benchmark]. Always learn from the pros. Read a newspaper
or scour online news sites to find appealing blog post title ideas.
○ Headlines are visual. include eye-catching images and visuals. Spend time
choosing the best ‘featured image’ for every headlines.
● Attracting Global Traffic with Your Content:
○ Use Google Analytics Geo reports to monitor your global traffic
○ Use Google trends to identify market potential for your content
○ Create native content for international markets
○ Build relationship or joint ventures with local influencers
○ Offer your top performing content for translations and global distribution
○ Use geo analytics for performance media
○ Think globally when you create content!
● Code:
○ Put proper keywords on Page Title, which is the summary of what your web
page is all about
○ Optimize Meta Description: they describe your web page’s content to search
engines in more detail
○ URL Structure. In short, you want to include hyphenated keywords in your
URLs, and keep them rather short and static if possible.
○ Schema.org Markup. Think of schema.org markup as another way you can give
search engines to understand your content better. It has to do with semantics and
rich snippets.
● SEO Browser (http://www.seo-browser.com) is a tool that lets you see your website
as search engines see it
● Mining Golden Nugget Keywords:
○ What are Golden Nugget keywords? Words and phrases, typed into a search
engine by users, that deliver desirable visitors to your site.
○ Golden Nugget keywords are not “generic” keywords. Competition for generic
keywords is fierce and getting visibility is expensive.
○ Golden Nugget Keywords are effective in terms of driving traffic that will result
in business, and fewer websites are competing for them.
○ Start keyword research from google search bar type ahead
○ What keywords are your customers likely to use to find you?
■ When people call your business, what do they ask for?
■ Is your firm a member of any industry associations?
■ Brainstorm keywords for your website by creating a list of keywords that
customers use to reference your business, your products, and your
services.
○ What keywords are your competitors using?
■ The text linked to their websites (also known as their Page Title tags remember that one?) will have the top keyword phrases that they are
targeting.
○ Do these keywords attract buyers or content consumers?
■ Analyze each keyword for commercial intent. Would someone search
for the keyword because he or she is looking to make a purchase or
would someone search for the keyword because he or she is looking for
more information?
■ Google can usually answer this question for you quickly. Search for
the keywords on your list. If the results include businesses offering a
product or service, it’s a keyword that people use when they intend to buy.
If the results include Wikipedia results, blogs, and articles, then it’s likely a
keyword that people use when they intend to learn more about a topic.
● Do your keywords get enough searches?
○ The Google AdWords Keyword Planner can show you an estimated number of
searches for each keyword you enter.
● Keyword Funnel and Mapping:
○ Awareness keywords.
○ Research keywords.
○ Consideration keywords.
○ Decision Keywords
● Internal Linking (aka “Link Juice”): Internal linking is an important subject that goes
hand-in-hand with keyword mapping and building a search-friendly site structure.
○ mart internal linking can help you direct the attention of search engines to the
pages that are most important to you.
● Keyword research toolbox:
○ Google’s Keyword Planner (https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner)
Actual search query and volume.
○ Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends/) Insight for search.
○ Keyword Eye (http://www.keywordeye.com/) Visual keyword and competitor
research.
○ Keyword Discovery (http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/) Provides you with
insights and ideas for keywords that helps you to improve SEO content, PPC
campaign growth, and performance.
○ Ubersuggest (http://ubersuggest.org/) Free keyword suggestion.
○ SEMRush (http://www.semrush.com) Competing sites performance on search.
○ Soovle (http://www.soovle.com/) Visual way of research keywords.
○ MerchantWords (https://www.merchantwords.com/) mines Amazon data for
searchers and queries. Helpful to identify ecommerce terms, as well as niche and
long-tail keywords.
○ Answers.com. Long tail keywords.
● Optimizing Your Sit:
○ Page Title Tag
○ Meta Description Tag is the description of your document (up to 1 60
characters), or in this case, a page on your website.
○ Alt Tag: Alt tags are text descriptions of each image used on a webpage
○ URL Structure: Properly optimized URLs help bots and people determine what
your webpage is about.
● Becoming Fast Like a Cheetah:
○ How to check your Page Speed?
○ Google provides an excellent feature called Page Speed Insights
(https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) that’s part of its
Webmaster Tools suite.
○ complete manual for site speed optimization for Wordpress users on
SearchDecoder.com you can check out here:
http://www.searchdecoder.com/website-speed-optimization/.
○ Compress Your Images with Kraken.io
○ Spring Cleaning Time with WP Optimize: WP Optimize
(https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-optimize/).
○ Caching your WordPress Website with WP Rocket:
● Technical Audit for Non-Techies
○ Starts with a self evaluation, critical eye auditing.
○ You need to look at a website from the perspective of a user:
■ Does the site serve a need, does it answer a problem, and can a visitor
come to the homepage and know instantly what products and services
are offered?
■ Are the resources well thought out, are blog posts shallow and sloppy, or
focused and high quality?
■ Does the site load quickly?
■ Is it organized logically?
■ Does it make people want to move further into it (or click the browser
"back" button)?
■ What happens when a user fills out a form, picks up the phone, or makes
a purchase?
○ SEO Technical Audit:
■ Duplicate Content can lower your site's search engine rankings,
reducing the traffic to your site.
■ Broken Links can damage your site's user experience and lower your
site's search engine rankings.
■ 404 Errors can harm your website’s indexibility and performance in
search engines.
■ 301 Redirects provide a way to send both users and search engines to a
different URL from the one they originally requested.
■ Robot.txt are lines of code that a developer can place on your website to
exclude it from search engine result pages.
■ XML Sitemap is a document that helps Google and other major search
engines better understand your website while crawling it
● SEO Technical Audit Tools:
○ Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) (google.com/webmasters/tools/) is a free
service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site's
presence in Google Search results.
○ Bing Webmaster Tools (http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster)
○ Siteliner (http://www.siteliner.com/) is a free tool that lets you explore your
website, revealing key issues that affect your site's quality and search engine
rankings.
○ Screaming Frog (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/). This tool lets
you quickly analyze, audit, and review a site from an onsite SEO perspective
○ SEMRush (http://www.SEMRush.com) tool has many useful features, one of
which is SEO Audit. It’s a spider that crawls your website and comes back with a
list of errors and issues that can be pulling you back in SEO.
○ WayBack Machine (https://archive.org/web/web.php).
○ Alexa (http://www.alexa.com)
● Feeding the Hummingbird:
○ Hummingbird uses a lot of different sources to determine how important any
given web page or site is.
○ These sources include a
■ synonym engine,
■ the Knowledge Graph,
■ the search history of users,
■ document meta-information,
■ geo-location data, and
■ other sources associated with the searcher's known identity to better
establish the search intent of ‘verbose’ queries.
○ You should do three things to make Hummingbird happy:
■ Optimize content naturally. Hummingbird should cause copywriters to
focus on themes — not just keywords — when crafting content. - write
more naturally, without obsessing about keyword density
■ Disclose your identity to Google. While Google has denied that social
signals are incorporated into search rankings, it is clear that the more
Google knows about a given publisher, the more likely it is that such a
publisher (if legitimate) will be correctly accorded the credit he/she is due.
● At minimum, publishers seeking to take advantage of
Hummingbird should have Google Accounts in order to verify
their identities.
■ Structure your data. Structuring web documents correctly will enhance
Hummingbird's ability to understand and correctly contextualize web
content. publishers should take steps to more granularly tag their
documents by applying microdata format tagging as specified by
schema.org.
○ Using Schema For Non-Techies:
■ Its purpose is to increase the major search providers' understanding of
the web in order to create better, more in-depth search results.
■ When you mark up certain content on your website with a schema, you're
helping the search engines understand ‘exactly’ what your content
is and how it should be treated.
■ Hierarchy of schema:
● Item scope: telling search engines this is about a particular item.
● Item type: telling what type of content the following block of
information is.
● Item prompt. Drill deeper on item type and providing details on
other people.
● Credibility:
○ What is credibility? The quality of being believed or trusted.
○ Credibility = High-Quality Links to Your Site
○ you can build up your own credibility by accumulating natural, editorial links —
the ones that search engines like best, and by showing search engines that the
people who create you content — your authors — have credibility
themselves.
○ if you have valuable content and build strong relationships, credible people
will want to link to you.
○ . The foundation of building your online credibility lies in your ability to create
amazing content and build social connections.
○ Build your credibility beyond the Internet, in real world. Engage in public
speaking, by attending industry events, and by guest blogging.
○ Focus on quality over quantity.Don’t publish five mediocre, "off the top of my
head" articles, a week on five mediocre websites. Publish one great, well
researched article instead so that your content is actually worth a link.
○ Establish credibility with patience in mind. Don’t force the trust-building
process. Persistently build bonds with authorities in your niche to slowly and
steadily gain trust and to optimize your SEO campaign.
■ Interview pros working in your industry, set up Google Authorship to
establish your authority in search engines, and use social media to
augment your outreach campaign.
■ Developing strong bonds with serious authorities in your niche can
greatly enhance your credibility.
○ Stay away from black hat link building techniques involving the sale, barter, or
trade of links. Doing this can utterly destroy your hard-earned credibility. A
good rule of thumb to tell if it’s black hat is when link building is sold to you for a
couple of hundred bucks, or when the package includes items such as
directory submissions, commenting, guest blog posting on low-quality
sites, and multiple press releases (sounds familiar?). Those tactics are not
sustainable and will eventually get you in trouble with Google.
○ “The objective of link building is that it is natural, and not that it appears to be
natural.” Matt Cutts, Head of Webspam at Google
● Measuring Your Credibility:
○ Page rank:
■ CheckPageRank.net or PRChecker.net to check PageRank of any
domain. You can also install the SEOQuake (http://www.seoquake.com)
browser plugin to instantly check the strength of a domain or a web page.
○ Domain/Page Authority:
■ Use Moz’s Open Site Explorer (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose)
tool to view the domain authority of any web site on the Web. You can do
multiple competitor comparison
■ I also find the MozBar, a browser plug-in, very useful because it lets me
check the competitive SEO environment for ranking opportunity when I
search Google.
○ Author Rank:
■ ClearVoice (https://clearvoice.com/search/) is a tool that attempts to
measure author rank and I like it
■ ClearVoice measures authority based on these metrics:
● — The domain authority of the published content
● — The power of the site the writer published their content on
● — The frequency of the articles published by the writer
● — The quantity of articles published by the writer
● — The variety of domains the writer publishes to
● — The social relevance of each individual piece of content
■ The score also takes into account a publishers’ authorship, which
determines proper credit for content created.
○ There’s a large quantity of writers on the web today, but quantity is not what
is important. What is important is the quality of the writer, and the quality of
work that is produced.
■ Google can now easily filter out thin, content farm/ghostwritten
content and each day they seem to more and more reward the content
(and content creators) that has value to long-tail, semantic searches.
● Link Building Game Plan:
○ "The objective is not to make your links appear natural; the objective is that your
links are natural.
○ Ever since Penguin arrived on the scene, Google has been targeting and
penalizing all those who’ve engaged in these blackhat practices, which
directly violate Google’s Terms of Service.
○ Requirement:
■ hard work
■ Patience
■ Persistence
○ What skills are involved in effective link building?
■ Empathy: When you put yourself in someone else’s shoes you’re forced
to answer the question:
● Why should someone link to me? Do they like sharing
controversial content? Or do they prefer how-to guides? Are they
generous linkers or do they need some warming up before your
pitch? Empathy also helps you send killer outreach emails. When
you understand the other person, you write in a voice that
resonates with them.
■ Better outreach emails=more links.
■ Sales: Empathy is great, but the best link builders are closers. Like any
good salesperson, you need to push buttons that get people to ACT.
■ Content Marketing and Writing: Link building without great content is
like bringing a knife to a gunfight
■ Web Design and UX: Like anything in business, your content’s
presentation is massively important.
○ How has the link building game evolved?
■ creating great resources and promoting them with email outreach.
■ Create and promote amazing resources. There’s no shortcut here: this
takes a ton of work.
■ Guest posting. No, it’s not dead. As long as you don’t go overboard and
build links from irrelevant sites, you’ll be fine
■ Business listing pages. You’d be surprised by how many authoritative
pages online simply list (and link to) businesses.
■ “How do you get that link?” Fill out a simple form. Done. Also try
searching for things like lists of travel apps or fitness startups to find
pages that cater to your startup’s industry. Reach out to them.
■ Create, speak, and sponsor events. One of the best things about the
startup community is how they love to meet in real life. When you become
involved in events, you’ll generate links. And if you want a guaranteed
link, just speak at or sponsor an event – organizers always link to
speakers and sponsors!
■ Partnerships. Bootstrap entrepreneurs do business formally or
informally with other businesses. But they usually don’t ask them to get a
link from the people they work with. Huge opportunity for easy (and white
hat) links.
○ Digital PR = Link Building 2.0
■ In a world where bloggers are journalists and consumers look for news on
Google and YouTube, SEO and PR teams need to be like husband and
wife: synched up and synergized
■ Realizing the value that good storytelling, proper messaging, and PR
can add to startups, and convinced that big agency life was not for him,
■ You will have informal PR anyway, and choosing to not actively engage
and forming it is a mistake
■ The belief that PR should take backseat in startup is a fatal mistake
○ PR myth:
■ In order to have a successful PR you have to work with a PR guru - false.
Be skeptical of those who call themselves PR guru. Best people in PR are
not guru and special but are scrappy, energetic, and calculated. Effort and
strategy trumps all other characteristics.
■ People in PR are either unintelligent or shady. - false.
○ How to measure your Digital PR success?
■ number of media hits => bad metric.
■ — How many people were directed to our website from that post?
■ — What percentage of them turned into paying customers?
■ — Was our target demographic represented in the referred traffic?
■ — How many people shared the post with their social networks?
■ — Was the reaction positive?
● Guest Blogging Done
○ Right Guest blogging gives you the ability to build credibility, links pointing to
websites and social profiles, social following, community, industry relationships,
visibility, increased traffic, and more. It’s one of the many ways to make a name
for yourself in an industry, promote your business, and build a community
○ Guest Blogging Best Practices
■ When it comes to guest blogging it’s important to build relationships
with other bloggers and editors.
■ Once you’re pitching and contributing to another website, you want to
create content that’s of value to your audience and the audience that
typically reads the content on the website you’re contributing to.
■ It’s important to match the style and guidelines of the blog you’re
contributing to, whether that means they prefer articles on a certain
subject, of a certain word count, etc.
■ Use SocialCrawlytics (https://socialcrawlytics.com) to analyze the
best performing content of the blog you want to write for.
■ Identify the most shared blog posts and refer to them in your outreach to
its editor, pitching to write similar content.
■ Create quality content that includes a bio about yourself with links to
your relevant properties, whether that’s your own blog, social accounts,
a link to your new book, or a link to your upcoming webinar. Always ask
yourself: “Is this post of value to those who I’m trying to reach?”
○ Most importantly, you aren’t going to find success with three articles you’ve
contributed to other websites. It’s a long-term commitment that won’t start to
drive results for yourself until you’ve gotten a large quantity of quality articles out
there.
○ By consistently covering certain subjects over time, you’ll be considered an
expert on those topics
○ I’ve also learned more about which headlines resonate the best with readers
across different blogs and publications
○ answering comments on your articles will help continue to drive
conversations about your articles over time, since readers know you’re there
to have an ongoing dialogue, whether it’s in the comments area of an article or
on Twitter.
● How to Land High-Value Guest Blogging Gigs
○ You need to continually write content on your own website, as well as guest blog
on lesser-known websites in your industry.
○ Once you’ve written a number of quality posts on your properties, as well as on
third-party websites, you can start to pitch bigger, more popular, and more
exclusive publications.
● The lesson here is this: if you don’t play by the rules, you’re going to get your wrist
slapped by Google.
● Google is cracking down on spammy guest blogging practices. What you need to do
is continue to provide quality content on your own website and on the websites
you’re contributing to reap the full benefits of guest blogging without being
penalized by the search engines.
● Link Building Tools & Tricks:
○ To give your credibility a boost, connect with other bloggers as you dive into
content creation.
○ Fellow Bloggers, Podcasters, Newsletter Junkies, and YouTubers who dig your
style (and like you) will link to your content.
○ Fellow bloggers can also offer you interviews, and interviews can lead to great
inbound links from those known by the blogger (and some bloggers know a
lot of people!).
○ Optimizing your content comes down to creating magnetic headlines for your
content that resonate with a carefully-selected, targeted audience, and
building relationships with community members.
○ Tools:
■ Kingged (http://www.kingged.com) is a content curation site developed
by Kingsley. Kingged lays out content according to its niche. Scroll down
the home page to target your niche.
■ Triberr (http://www.triberr.com). founded to connect like-minded
bloggers through an engaging platform. After signing up for Triberr, ask to
join niche-specific tribes to optimize your content (make sure to request
membership first). Active participants will easily gain invites into new
tribes.Engage frequently. Join only niche-specific tribes and comment on
relevant blog posts to see the greatest returns for your content
optimization campaign
■ Other community sites that are worth checking out include
BlogEngage.com, Inbound.org, Reddit.com, BizSugar.com, and
GrowthHackers.com.
● Smart Outreach:
○ by featuring your infographic, or by allowing you to guest post on their sites. It’s
all about offering value.
○ Your outreach techniques should blend with other forms of marketing, including:
■ – Influencer relations
■ – Social media
■ – Co-marketing (best if done with companies larger than yours so you can
ride on their coattails)
■ – Digital media relations (which work wonderfully)
○ the techniques below can be used for any type of outreach:
■ – Seek feedback (Brian Honigman offered me great tips)
■ – Test different pitch copy
■ – Keep it short (this is key; less is more)
■ – Communicate value
■ – Build credibility
■ – Provide examples of your work
○ Tools:
■ Tynt (http://www.tynt.com) is a powerful tool to help increase SEO
traffic. It’s a widget that inserts your webpage URL when your content is
copied and pasted into social networks, emails, and digital media outlets.
Advantages:
● Improving SEO rankings.
● Driving incremental traffic
● Getting actionable editorial insight
● Enhancing your user experience
● Getting credit for your content
● Link analysis toolbox:
○ Open Site Explorer (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose)
○ Majestic SEO (https://majestic.com)
○ Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com)
○ Ravens Tools (http://raventools.com)
○ Link Research Tools (http://www.linkresearchtools.com)
○ Link detective
● Outreach & Prospecting Tools:
○ Pitchbox (http://pitchbox.com) automates the grunt work so you can focus on
what you do best: creating real, person-to-person connections with the people
you want to reach.
○ BuzzStream (http://www.buzzstream.com) is a web-based software that helps
the world’s best marketers promote their products, services and content.
○ Follower Wonk (https://followerwonk.com) helps you explore and grow your
social graph by identifying social media influencers
● CONNECTIONS Your Network is your Net Worth. Let’s get social!
○ Winning Social Media Strategies:
■ Remember that trust is the number one social media currency.
■ Keep image and branding in mind at all times
■ Optimize each field on your social media profiles.
■ Do things; tell people.
■ Expose yourself to as many people across as many platforms as humanly
possible.
■ Make Friends Fast.
■ Think of the Golden Rule; give what you want to get.
■ Display Your Work Freely.
■ Create artful content.
○ rise above social media noise.
○ Lesson from boxing:
■ Right Hooks. Right hooks are the knockout punches. For marketers,
those are the next highly anticipated campaigns that are going to increase
revenue and make users engage in a cult-like following. A CMO’s dream.
Right hooks are calls to action that benefit your business. They are meant
to convert traffic into sales and ROI. Except when they don’t….
■ Jabs. Jabs are a series of conversations, interactions and engagements,
delivered one at a time, that slowly but authentically build relationships.
■ Jab, jab, jab, right hook = give, give, give, ask.
○ Know Your Platform, Act Like a User
■ Each social media has a different theme, adopt that, rather than single
content across all
■ you need to act like the user.
■ Your number one job is to tell a story.
■ There is no 60-day, there is only the 365-day marketing campaign,
■ Do not cling to nostalgia => don’t ignore social media with critical mass
■ Like boxers, great storytellers are observant and nimble
■ A story is at its best when it’s non-intrusive
■ Content for the sake of content is pointless. => be relevant and
engage
■ Content is king, but context is God.
○ In summary, getting people to hear your story on social media and act on it
requires:
■ — using a platform’s native language;
■ — paying attention to context;
■ — understanding the nuances and subtle differences that make each
platform unique;
■ — and adapting your content to match.
● Social Media Automation:
○ Another dirty little secret about social media is that it’s labor-intensive.
○ Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com) is a social media management system for
businesses and individuals to execute social media campaigns across multiple
social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard.
○ maintain a fair balance of ‘native’ tweeting, sharing, asking, responding and
‘scheduling’ content to be shared.
● Think conversation, not campaign
○ What are the common social media pitfalls? The #1 most common (fatal) mistake
I see with companies is planning to fail => means they have no strategy or plan.
○ Other common social media pitfalls are:
■ – Spelling and grammar errors (this is probably a close 2nd!)
■ – Linking social media sites to “save” time
■ – Signing up for sites and then never posting there – Using every social
media network
■ – Not knowing the difference between tone and voice
■ – Not interacting with your communities
■ – Not humanizing your brand
■ – Jargon speak
■ – Not sharing value
○ How to build a following on social networks?
■ Identify where your brand best fits first, and then take a look at where
your target users spend their time. This will ensure you’re able to grow a
decent following on your chosen platforms. We also don’t get mired in the
numbers.
■ Vanity metrics are where amateurs focus – relationships and
conversions are where your focus should be.
○ How to convert followers to community?
■ If you really want to start understanding your audience, you need to
know what drives them and what their buying behaviors are
■ It’s kind of like dating. You have to “woo” your target customers with
good content. You have to prove you’re more valuable than the next
guy/girl
■ Two-way conversation also means responding to negative comments
○ Why use psychographic research for social media?
■ both parties are vulnerable, trustworthy, and accepting.
■ Psychographics answer the question every marketer is trying to answer:
“What do my buyers want?”
● So have more conversations.
● Woo your audience.
● Be dateable.
● Eventually you’ll be able to ask psychographics-type questions
and get answers.
○ How to measure return on social media investment?
■ If everything you post on social media is cliché, your results will be
cliché.
■ If you only share dull facts, you may only receive dull factual
information in return.
■ If you push for opinions and feelings — and are sure to share your own
— you may start to receive opinions and feelings from your community.
It’s that simple
■ build relationships with their connected communities.
○ Social Media Toolbox:
■ Follower Wonk (https://followerwonk.com) is a Twitter intelligence tool
that can be used to track and analyze followers, as well as search and
find key influencers via Twitter bios.
■ Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com) manages social media and
messaging on a dashboard that integrates your brand’s social networks
and apps
■ Tweet Adder (http://tweetadder.com) is an automated Twitter system
that is touted as a “time saver.”
■ Mention Map (http://mentionmapp.com) is an exciting web app for
exploring your Twitter network.
■ Rite Tag (https://ritetag.com) empowers you to identify the right
#hashtags to get your message further, getting your content out to those
who are passively and actively looking for it
■ Topsy (http://topsy.com) combines social search and social analytics
combined into one indexed.
■ Social Crawlitics (https://socialcrawlytics.com) identifies your
competitor’s most shared content and discover social media metrics
behind each URL on your site.
● Building Your Tribe
○ Google has a ‘love affair’ with websites that have a strong community of
users who contribute user-generated content (a.k.a UGC) through
publishing tools, forums, and commenting.
○ In my experience, there is no shortcut to community development. It’s a
grind, but your approach is far more important than how hard you hustle. You
cannot buy love on social media; you have to earn it.
○ Audience vs. Community. Audiences only follow you, but Communities, on the
other hand, support you and trumpet your brand to their followers.
○ Build a community through patience and persistence. Gaming the social
media marketing system by buying “Likes” won’t help you create an active,
engaging following.
○ focus on a specific niche and build your expertise in that area through
thought leadership content, including blogging, ebooks, video tutorials, etc.
○ Participate in forums and comment on other sites that are more popular than
yours. Build relationships by providing value
○ Once you start developing traffic to your site, introduce community tools, such
as forums, and provide value by answering questions and moderating.
○ Require a signup so that you can collect emails to promote your info-products.
○ Repeat, learn, test. The formula is simple; consistency is hard.
● User development do’s and don’ts:
○ Bootstrapping spirit is being pumped with adrenaline, blazing through
branches, no fear and no pain, when faced with obstacle, take a second to come
up with solutions, like a man in a jungle
○ DO create a ‘Coming Soon’ page with an email subscribe area months before
you launch.
○ DO launch in a closed Beta for as long as it takes to work the bugs out.
○ DO offer registration/sign in options for social media, such as Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn and G+.
○ DO blog about your project updates, industry news and curate useful content.
○ DO email your entire member list at least once a month. It’s a great way to stay
top of mind, and there will be so many changes in a month’s time that your
community will like hearing.
○ DON’T try to get a TechCrunch write-up right away. A TC mention will send a
flood of traffic to what is likely a half-baked site. Try to wait a year or so before
pursuing major outlet mentions.
○ DON’T spend money on Adwords, banner ads, or any form of marketing
where you pay for traffic. Instead, spend your money on marketing tools such
as MailChimp, Buffer, and WordPress themes.
○ DON’T try to be on every social network. Choose one or two that you’re
actually going to invest time and energy in. Which two depends on your
product, your audience, and your personal preference
● How to attract your first 1 ,000 followers?
○ In order to build a powerful brand on a platform like Meetup.com, you must be
unique and be prepared for the fact that acquiring your first 500 or 1 ,000 users
is likely to take some time. So it won’t be a business from the get-go. You
must have other businesses to supplement your income somehow during
that initial period of time.
○ Enable your users to interact with each other. The network effects matter a
lot!
○ Define your value proposition. You must constantly give away value to keep
growing your community. That means no BS talk. Everything you do must
generate direct or indirect value to your users.
○ Niche social media:
■ Slide share => tell stories on it, colorful imagery, and eye catching title;
craft slogan. [search matthew capala for slides there]. Explain what you
do visually, and put visuals of your image. List services and credentials of
yours. Share examples of your work. Post image of your work. WoM by
testimonial sharing on your slides. Say something interesting about
yourself and your community work. Post contact information makes it
easy to contact you. Explain what you do... visually. Go Off Topic. Why?
Easy. People want to partner with a human.
■ Reddit => goals: keep on top of pop culture and internet culture.
Challenge you and beliefs. Teach you about important items.
● Find the right subreddit. Use Stdatit.com, redditMetrix.com, and
subreddit tools.
● Develop thick skin, because you will get blunt criticism. Maybe
it interprets it differently.
■ Quora => receive opinions and answer questions about daily items.
Follow insightful people. Subject matter expert response. Categories of
interest follow up. Focus crowdsourcing tool.
● Monitoring for your business. Relationship building. Research and
feedback. Create brand awareness.
● Social Media Hacks from the Trenches:
○ I use IFTTT to automate social sharing. One of my favorite IFTTT
(https://ifttt.com/) recipes is to save articles on Feedly and have them sent to
my Buffer account.
○ I use Grammarly to automate proofreading. Enter Grammarly
(https://www.grammarly.com/). This browser plug-in is free, easily to install and
checks your writing across the web.
○ I use Instagram to build stories
○ I use Tweetfull to retweet. Tweetfull (http://tweetfull.com) lets you select
keywords and hashtags, and it will retweet popular content based on sentiment
analysis
○ I use Quora to ask and answer questions
○ I use LinkedIn publishing tools
● CASH Got traffic? Time to make some cash.
○ Practice detachment. To build your SEO campaign on a solid foundation, it's
best to detach yourself from immediate money outcomes at the outset of the
process. At the same time, however, it's vital to form a clear monetization
strategy on day one, using quantifiable metrics such as newsletter list
growth. Measurable goals are the foundation of every healthy monetization
scheme.
○ Don’t do any hard selling before you've won trust and credibility.
○ Ask for the subscriber’s name and email address, before you ask them to
open up their wallets.
○ You need to build an intelligent, multi-stage approach to making money
through your online endeavors. Offering free, useful and targeted content
primes the monetization pump. Give away free ebooks and other useful
products to build your email list.
● 5 Website Monetization Models:
○ The Brochure Model. Here, your website functions as a business card or
brochure for your offline business.
○ The Subscription Model: Your website offers high-quality, exclusive content that
users are drawn to and are either willing to pay for directly or are willing to
exchange personal information for (typically by giving you an email address
and/or phone number).
■ Use email and list management such as AWeber or MailChimp to
effectively manage your newsletter campaigns
○ The email messages you send to subscriber don't have to look fancy. Don’t
sweat purchasing expensive newsletter designs or templates before you get
more than a couple of thousand email subscribers. I still use plain text (as do
some of the biggest newsletter gurus out there). Don’t obsess over the form of
your email; rather focus on the value you are proving to your readers.
■ Never spam.
○ The Advertising Model: Your website offers great content and you’ve developed
an engaged audience and a steady flow of traffic
○ The ECommerce Model: This model is fairly self-explanatory: your website has
a shopping cart and you sell directly to consumers
○ The Affiliate Model: Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based
marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or
customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts
■ There are many affiliate networks you can join, the largest being
Commission Junction (now CJ Affiliate at http://www.cj.com)
● Making Money With Your Blog:
○ Create value.
○ Target your ideal customer
○ Make friends. Be a friend to make friends. Promote other people, comment on
their blogs, and build strategic partnerships through social networking sites and
email.
○ Typically it takes 6 months to a year to start making money online if you
follow a proven system based on creating and targeting content and making
connections.
● The New Rules of Content Monetization:
○ Network Effect
○ Start with 1 0 Ideas
○ The Power of Compounding
○ Amazon is the Doorway
○ Smart Keyword Targeting: I used the MerchantWords
(https://www.merchantwords.com/) tool to come up with a creative keyword
strategies to optimize my book
○ Categories and Taxonomy
○ Blog the Book
○ Launch Your Kindle eBook
○ Launch Your Paperback Book through CreateSpace
○ Launch Your Audio Book Use Audio Creation Exchange
(http://www.acx.com/), aka AXC, to pick a skilled narrator to present your book
audibly
■ Choose Audible (http://www.audible.com/) for your audio book
marketplace.
○ Launch an Online Course Launch an online course through the platform known
as Udemy (http://udemy.com).
○ Your “do it yourself” video and audio production toolbox should include Camtasia
(http://camtasia.com) and Audacity (http://audacity) to create high quality
videos, produce screencasts and remaster audio
○ Use Subscription-Based Platforms. Spread your online course word with
SkillShare (http://skillshare.com) and SkillFeed (http://skillfeed.com).
● SEO Like 201 5: Stop, Start, Continue
○ STOP trying to game the system.
○ STOP spraying links all over the web
○ STOP treating the internet like a get-rich-quick scheme.
○ CONTINUE embracing the power of reviews.
○ CONTINUE being amazing. At the end of the day, make sure you’re building,
making, creating, selling something great.
○ START thinking about the future. Think about wearables like Google Glass and
the iWatch.
○ START developing your entity relationships. Everything is related to something.
Semantic web.
○ START bending to the search engines’ whim. If they tell you to nofollow, do it. If
they give you a new schema tag to use, use it
○ START focusing on real metrics. Rankings are nice to track, and they can tell
you a lot about things when you view them in categories
○ Question. Test. Test Again. Build. Destroy
● SEO Commando!
○ Observation and Intel-gathering
○ Multidisciplinary teams
○ Relative Autonomy
○ Unusual and Colorful Personalities.
○ Psychological Warfare.
○ Stealth and Deception
○ Exclusivity
From my old notes:
● Context of SEM/SEO:
○ Lots of tools to leverage. It is more technology rather than anything.
○ Competitor content reverse engineering is the key.
○ Readiness to respond to negative public comments
○ Differentiation, uniqueness, and relevance of the content is the key.
○ Link analysis and balancing portfolio of links (not having low quality links) is the
key)
○ Structuring the content and tags are the coding part.
○ Being connected to well known authority websites is also a key.
○ Analytics and KPI evaluation, and measurement is the main guidance
○ Connect to famous people, in influencers, and link on their posts on social media
○ Connecting to other public blogs, news, and writing collaborative content with
other bloggers (after short email intro)
● Signals of low quality content that Google puts penalty for fraud on the content:
○ 1 . short registration period.
○ 2. high ratio of ad blocks to content.
○ 3. javascript redirects from the initial landing page. direct vs indirect competition.
○ 4. common high commercial value spam keywords such as student credit card,
poker, texas etc.
○ 5. many links to other low quality spam sites.
○ 6. few links to high quality, trusted sites. use google data highlighter.
○ 7. high keyword frequencies and keyword densities.
○ 8. zero or very little, unique content.
○ 9. very few direct visits.
○ 1 0. registered to people/entities previously associated with untrusted sites.
○ 11 . not registered with services such as google search console or bin webmaster
tools.
○ 1 2. rarely have short, high-value domain
○ 1 3. often contain many keyword-stuffed subdomains.
○ 1 4. more likely to have loner domain names.
○ 1 5. less likely to have links from trusted sources.
○ 1 6. less likely to have SSL security certificates.
○ 1 7. Less likely to be in high quality directories such as DMO, Yahoo!, and Best of
web. 1 8. Unlikely to have any significant quantity of branded searches.
○ 1 9. unlikely to be bookmarked in services such as delicious.
○ 20. unlikely to get featured in social voting sites such as Digg, reddit,
StumbleUpon, and so forth.
○ 21 . Unlikely to have channels on YoutTube, communities on Google+ or
Facebook, or links from Wikipedia.
○ 22. Unlikely to be mention on major news sites.
○ 23. Unlikely to be registered with Google & Bin local listing.
○ 24. Likely to have the domain associated with emails on blacklists.
○ 25. Often contain a large number of snippets of ""duplicate"" content found
elsewhere on web.
○ 26. Frequently feature commercially focused content.
○ 27. Many levels of links away from highly trusted websites.
○ 28. Rarely contain privacy policy & copyright notice pages.
○ 29. rarely listed in the better business bureau's online directory.
○ 30. Rarely contain high-grad-level text content (as measured by metrics such as
the Flesch-Kincaid reading level).
○ 31 . rarely have small snippets of text quoted on other websites & pages. 32.
commonly employ cloaking based on user agent or IP address.
○ 23. Rarely have online or offline marketing campaigns. 24. Rarely have the link
programs pointing to them.
○ 25. May have links to a significant portion of the sites & pages that link to them.
○ 26. Extremely unlikely to be mentioned or linked to in scientific research papers.
○ 27. Unlikely to use expensive web technologies (Microsoft Server & coding
products that require licensing fee).
○ 28. More likely to contain malware, viruses, or spyware (or any automated
downloads).
○ 29. Likely to have privacy protection on the whois information for their domain.
Look at search results and get a sense of rank weightings.
● Good tools:
○ web hosting providers: wpengine, and rackspace.
○ email marketing tools: maropost, aweber, klaviyo.
○ sample CRM software: infusionsoft, salesforce.
○ Example payment provider: stripe, squareup.
○ Sample landing page software: instapage, unbounce.
○ Sample image sourcing and editing software: anva, snagIt, Pixlr.
○ Social media software: hootsuite pro, edgar, mention.
○ Sample analytics software: google analytics, google data studio, google tag
manager.
○ Sample marketing optimization tools: vwo, truconversion.
○ Backlink analysis of competitors by Open Site Explorer, Majestic-SEO, Ahrefs,
or LinkResearchTools.
○ Competitor content analysis tools: Identify the most powerful link of competitor
by Open Site Explorer's Domain Authority, Page Authority, mozTrust. Majestic
SEO's CitationFlow, Trust Flow, CEMPERs Power*Trust, or Ahref's Backlinks
tools.
○ Identify bad links using tools: Use open site explorer. trust flow and citation flow
in majestic tools. use the click hunter tool.
○ everage Mozbar tool in-depth link metrics, MoRank, MozTrust. Open graph
protocol.
○ SEO quake firefox and chrome extensions.
○ SpyFu tool provides estimated daily ad budget,....
○ Other analytics tool: Google keyword autocomplete as signal of popularity.
google adword display planner tool. google trend tool.
○ Majestic chrome extension. a href tool.
● Criteria to select tools:
○ email marketing software should have:
■ high deliverability,
■ automated,
■ good reporting,
■ mobile friendly.
○ CRM software should have:
■ centralized data.
■ good support and training,
■ good reporting.
○ payment solution should be:
■ Secure,
■ intuitive,
■ capable of recurrent billing.
○ Landing page software should be:
■ intuitive,
■ responsive to mobile,
■ Integrative.
○ Sourcing and editing image should be:
■ cloud based,
■ intuitive,
■ low cost.
○ Social media software should be:
■ cloud based,
■ multi user,
■ good reporting.
○ Data and analytics tools should be:
■ easy to use,
■ free, and
■ Robust.
○ Marketing optimization tool should be
■ supported and
■ multi purpose.
● Guidelines on building content:
○ Avoid misleading & deceitful contents.
○ Use memes, and
○ use of images.
○ Find out the best link your site has and get more of them.
○ share blog content and ask people to shareit
● Analytics and competitor analysis:
○ Track bounce rate, time on site, and spikes.
○ Monitor your competitor's website.
○ Find which portion of the site is well indexed, and if high conversion portions
have high traffic.
○ External backlink tracking and analysis..
○ Link and content quality is much more important than quantity. Differentiated info
nuggets better..
○ Use third party tools to find the crawl errors.
○ Use screaming front tool as diagnostic tools
○ use google alert for competitors and keywords you have specified.
○ be aware of limited sample size and bias of Alexa, compete, Comcast, quantcast,
and Comscore.
○ Use Twitter card Microformat.
Entrepreneurship time allocation for sales:
● Basically, entrepreneurs who have just started up, should; from the outset, spend 80% of
their time in an attempt to create a market for the products they want to sell.
● Product improvement and customer service standards are important tasks, but they will
be secondary until a sale has been made. Actions that involve the company appearance
and how it runs; (operational activities, image building, accountancy, legal, etc.); are
third-level requirements in Step 1 and should be set aside.
● for the majority of entrepreneurs, all you need is a decent product and good customer
service. Sell, sell and sell again is the number one priority..
● These are the priorities for the company during
○ Step 1 : Ensure that the product is ready to be sold, but not necessarily perfect.
○ Step 2. Sell it.
○ Step 3. Then, if it sells, improve it..
● To do this, answer these four questions:
○ 1 . Where will I find my customers?.
○ 2. What’s the first product I will offer them?
○ 3. How much will I charge for this product?
○ 4. How do I convince them to buy?
● There is nothing more important in marketing than where you choose to get your
message across. A brilliant ad in the wrong place will not bring you any sales.
● We probably need to hire a copywriter for advertising at some point later.
● there are four marketing concepts you need to learn:.
○ 1 . The difference between wants and needs..
○ 2. The difference between use and benefit..
○ 3. How to create a Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
○ 4. How to sell the USP.
● Use emotional and logical appeal simultaneously in advertising..
● the most effective ads highlight only one benefit over all the others..
● A strong USP with a high probability of success meets these three criteria:.
○ 1 . Appears to be unique. The attribute that you choose to promote in your USP
does not have to be unique to your product, but it must appear that way..
○ 2. The usefulness. The unique feature of your product must be desirable, or
nobody will want it..
○ 3. Design excellence. If the USP of your product is correct, the chances are it is
also very simple. Very few complicated things become fashionable..
● All successful sales campaigns have 4 components:
○ 1 . The big idea. . The Big Idea applies to how you do your marketing. You
generally cannot use your USP in your ads. It requires something more dramatic
that creates a point of interest.
○ 2. The big promise. This will require you to spend time to think about your Big
Promise whilst you take into consideration how your Big Idea can contribute to an
improvement in the life of your customers.
○ 3. Specific statements. This is the stage where you put on your creative hat and
work with your copywriter to find statements to use in your ads all connected to
your Big Idea. He could potentially increase his income five fold, his chances with
women five fold, his chances of promotion five fold, etc.
■ Saying Five times your income, say Turn 35,000 into 1 75,000.
○ 4. Proof of these statements. so insist its copywriter obligation to provide real;
and meaningful examples of people who have become rich and famous through
their ability to communicate and get themselves understood. They should be able
to give you historical and anecdotal examples and gather testimonials whenever
possible. When the work is finished, you can ensure that the statements can be
separated; between those that have evidence to back them up and those that
don"
● Understand the secret of the Four-Legged Stool:
○ Every successful marketing campaign has four elements, as seen in the first part
of this column: the Big Idea, the Big Benefit, the Big Promise and the Proof.
○ If you ensure that your marketing team includes these 4 elements in each ad or
promotion, no need to worry about failures..
● 8. Understand that customer complaints and criticisms are the keys to better sales..
Less successful entrepreneurs hate customer complaints and criticisms because they
take them as a personal criticism.. More successful businessmen understand that
complaints and criticisms are the bricks and mortar for better products and lead to a
better sales pitch.
Writing
Focus on the audience
Consider your purpose and your audience before you begin writing, and let these guide both
what you say and how you say it.
Plainly state the issue you’re addressing and what you hope to achieve.
Keep your goal in mind: Don’t undermine your efforts with a hostile or inappropriate tone.
Understand that your readers have no time to waste: Get to the point quickly and clearly to
ensure that your message gets read.
Use a tone appropriate for your audience.
Emphasize the items most important to your readers. If they can easily see how your message
is relevant to them, they will be more likely to read it and respond.
Choose an intelligent, nonspecialist member of your audience to write for—or invent one—and
focus on writing for that person. Your message will be more accessible and persuasive to all
your readers as a result.
Process of Writing
● Approach a writing project as a series of manageable tasks using the MACJ method.
● Use the Madman to gather research and other material for the project, diligently keeping
track of quotations and sources. And allow more of your best ideas to come early by
methodically brainstorming at the beginning of the process.
● As the Architect, organize the Madman’s raw material into a sensible outline. Distill your
ideas into three main propositions.
● In the Carpenter phase, write as quickly as possible—without worrying about perfecting
your prose.
● Finally, assume the role of the Judge to edit, polish, and improve the piece. Do this in
several distinct passes, each time focusing on only one element of your writing.
● Find your focus by first generating a list of topics to cover.
● Develop these raw ideas into full sentences and categorize your main points in sets of
three.
● Arrange these sets in a logical order, keeping your reader’s needs in mind.
● Write your first draft as quickly as you can.
● Don’t get stuck waiting for inspiration. Try giving yourself 5 to 1 0 minutes for each
section when drafting.
● Resist the urge to perfect as you write. Saving the editing until the draft is finished will
keep the Judge from getting in your way.
● Schedule a time for the Carpenter to work—and when that time comes, begin.
● If you find yourself stumped, move on to a different section you’re more comfortable with
and come back to the problem once you’ve found your flow.
● Allow yourself ample time to revise and edit your work.
● Consider your draft in its entirety. Take a fresh look at your content and structure: Have
you said everything you need to—and in the most effective way?
● Then edit your work, fine-tuning to tighten, sharpen, and refine your prose.
● Distill your report (or part of it) into a chart, diagram, or other visual aid that helps your
audience understand the content and its import.
● Take your design cues from visuals you have found effective.
● Put yourself in the reader’s shoes to assess your clarity. Better yet, see whether a
colleague can accurately summarize the main points of your draft from a quick
read-through.
● Phrase your ideas as plainly and briefly as possible, aiming for an average sentence
length of 20 or fewer words.
● Pave your readers’ way with concrete details. Don’t try to push them there with abstract
assertions.
● Cultivate your letter writing to improve your writing skills more generally.
● Summarize the vital information at the beginning of the document.
● Summarize each section with a sentence that addresses “the five Ws” (who, what, when,
where, why) and how—and use these sentences to build your general summary.
● Provide only the information the reader needs to understand the issue—no more and no
less.
● Never use more words than necessary: If you can say it in two words instead of three, do
so—as long as the result still sounds natural.
● Tighten your prose by removing inessential prepositions, replacing abstract -ion nouns
with action verbs where possible, and replacing wordy be -verb phrases with more direct
simple verbs.
● Eliminate padding that doesn’t contribute to your meaning.
● Aim to write as naturally as you speak: Sound like a human being, not a corporation.
● Avoid boilerplate phrases that weigh down your language and suggest lazy thinking.
● Increase readability by expressing your ideas as directly as possible.
● Include only the relevant facts.
● Provide them in chronological order to make it easy for your readers to follow you.
● Organize your narrative by creating a chronology of relevant events before you write;
then string the events together in your draft. But avoid the rote recitation of unnecessary
dates.
● Use well-placed transitional phrases to guide the reader to your next idea and indicate
its relationship to what came before.
● Break up documents with concise, descriptive subheads to increase readability and help
readers quickly locate the information most important to them.
● Use a “summary” subhead to point your readers to the document’s highlights.
● Use consistent style and parallel syntax in your subheads to reinforce the document’s
logical and rhetorical cohesion.
● When considering verb number, watch for compound subjects, inverted syntax, and
prepositional phrases that follow the subject.
● Never mistake the object of a preposition for the subject of a sentence.
● Avoid using they/them/their as genderless singular pronouns in formal writing.
● Avoid double negatives.
● Follow the conventions of standard English.
● Improve your grasp of standard English by reading quality nonfiction, having colleagues
review your writing, and referring to grammar and usage guides when you have
questions.
● Routinely ask your colleagues and those you supervise to read your drafts and suggest
edits.
● Have them mark up the document and submit their edits in writing, rather than explaining
them in person, to avoid reacting defensively. Always thank them for their help.
● Foster an environment where edits are freely sought and offered—without overtones of
petty one-upmanship.
● Don’t overuse I. Use we, our, you, and your instead to add a personal touch and appeal
to your reader.
● Avoid stuffiness by overcoming any fear you might have of contractions.
● For clearer, more straightforward writing, prefer active voice—unless the passive in a
particular context sounds more natural.
● Vary the length and structure of your sentences.
● Make the reader’s job easier by avoiding acronyms when you can.
● Arrive at a relaxed but professional tone by writing your message as if you were
speaking to the recipient in person.
● Refer to people by name, use personal pronouns as you naturally would, and shun fancy
substitutes for everyday words.
● Always use your best judgment and a collegial tone in composing your messages, even
if the content isn’t positive. You’ll get better responses from your recipients and keep
yourself—and your company— out of trouble.
● Adopt a tone appropriate to your relationship with the recipient.
● Never use sarcasm in professional messages. It will result in a step away from—not
toward—your desired outcome.
● Email guidance:
○ Be as direct as possible while maintaining a polite tone. Come to the point of your
e-mail within the first two or three sentences.
○ Never click “Reply All” without first checking the recipient list. Send your e-mail
only to people who need to know its contents.
○ Keep e-mails brief. Restrict yourself to one screen’s worth of text and keep the
message tight and focused so your readers get the point fast.
○ Write a concise subject line that tells your recipients why you’re writing and what
it means to them. If they need to act on your message, make that clear in the
subject line.
○ Diligently adhere to standard writing conventions—even when typing with your
thumbs on a handheld device.
○ Keep your language simple, personal, and direct. Avoid canned phrases that add
little but pomposity and verbiage to your letter.
○ Motivate your readers to act on your letter by giving them reasons that matter to
them.
○ When conveying bad news, soften the blow by opening on a positive note. Follow
up by explaining the reason for the unfavorable outcome— without
overexploiting.
○ Consider the reader: Be polite, sympathetic, and professional.
○ Remain courteous and diplomatic. Accept responsibility for any mistakes you
may have made.
○ Choose a concise title or subject line that tells readers what topics the memo or
report covers and what they should do about it (or why they should care).
● Begin your document by addressing your main points and outlining the issue, your
solution, and the reason for it.
● Work from this summary when elaborating the body of your first draft.
● Modify the summary as you go to ensure that it accurately reflects what’s in the body.
● Use the sample phrases provided here to help articulate your impressions.
● Always pair your general statements with specific examples that support them.
A Checklist for the Four Stages of Writing
Madman
● Consider why you’re writing: What’s moved you to write? What’s the assignment? What
do you hope to achieve?
●
Think about who your readers are and what they need to know.
●
Figure out how much time you have, and work out a rough schedule for gathering ideas
and material, outlining, preparing a draft, and revising.
●
Research with imagination and gusto. Take notes on relevant information.
●
Push yourself to be creative. Don’t be content with obvious ideas that just anyone would
think of.
Architect
● Jot down your three main points in complete sentences—with as much specificity as
you can.
● Consider the best order of the three points and reorganize them if necessary.
●
Decide how to open and conclude the document.
●
Think about what visual aids might be helpful in conveying your ideas.
Carpenter
● If possible, turn away from all distractions. Silence your phone and your computer alerts,
and find an hour or so of solitude. You’ll be writing.
● Use your three-point outline as a guide.
● Start writing paragraphs that support the point you find easiest to start with—then move
to the other points.
● Write swiftly without stopping to edit or polish.
● Try to write a full section in one sitting. If you must get up in the middle of a section, start
the next sentence with a few words and then leave. (When you come back, you’ll find it
easier to resume a half-completed sentence than to start a new one.)
Judge
● Immediately after completing your draft, read it through with the idea of amplifying ideas
here and there.
● Then let it cool off—overnight, if you can, or for a few minutes if you’re working under an
urgent deadline.
● When you return to your draft, consider it from the audience’s perspective. Will it be
clear to everyone who looks at it, or does it require inside knowledge? Is it concise, or
does it waste words and time?
● Identify the draft’s two biggest flaws and try to fix them.
● Ask yourself:
○ Is anything essential missing?
○ Are important points stressed?
○ Is the meaning of each sentence clear and accurate?
○ Are my transitions smooth?
○ What can I trim without sacrificing important content?
○ Are there any vague passages I can sharpen with specific facts?
○ Are there boring passages I can word more vividly?
○ Can I improve the phrasing?
○ Can I improve the punctuation?
○ Are there any typos?
Some Dos and Don’ts of Business-Writing Etiquette
Dos:
● Proofread all documents before sending them out to make sure the spelling and
grammar are correct.
● Double-check that the recipient’s name is spelled correctly and that the form of address
is proper (Ms., Mrs., Miss, Mr., Dr., Judge, Justice, Honorable, etc.). Double-check the
envelope, too, if there is one.
● Sign business letters with your full name unless you’re friends with the recipient. If the
salutation is “Dear Mr. Smith,” sign your full name; if it’s “Dear George,” sign your first
name only.
● Sign your letters with an ink pen and not with a stamp of your signature.
● Always include your contact information so that the recipient will know how to respond to
you.
● If you’re sending a handwritten note to a business contact or friend, use a stamp to mail
the letter rather than meter-stamping the envelope.
● Before sending an e-mail, make sure that you have (a) included everyone you need in
the address block and (b) incorporated any attachments you refer to in the e-mail.
● Use white space effectively so that the document reads well and is not a strain on
people’s eyes. Create generous margins, leave spaces between paragraphs, break up
text with subheads if appropriate, and indent appropriately.
● Date your communications (except e-mails, which will date themselves) so that they give
the reader a reference time.
● Write distinctive thank-you notes if you’re writing them to several people in the same
office. It’s counterproductive if recipients compare their notes and realize you
mass-produced them.
Don’ts:
● Don’t use all caps. It amounts to shouting at the reader.
● Don’t return a letter to its sender by writing on it to save time or paper. A reply should be
on a separate piece of paper, even if it’s a short note. Contracts and other agreements
are a separate issue.
● Don’t write “Thank you in advance.” If you want to thank people in a request, simply
make the request and then write “Thank you.” Also, be sure to say thanks (perhaps in
person) again when the task has been completed.
● Don’t use BCC on an e-mail unless you are quite sure that it is necessary. It could get
you a bad reputation as being indiscreet.
● Don’t use tiny or unusual fonts that make your writing hard to read or that make you
seem flippant.
● Don’t write a very long topic in the subject line of an e-mail.
● Don’t write a thank-you note on a card with a preprinted “Thank you!” or “Merci” (it’s not
considered good manners).
● Don’t let the passage of time stop you from writing to express congratulations, gratitude,
condolences, or whatever other sentiment your instincts say you ought to express.
● Don’t write a letter in anger or frustration. Step back, take some time, and detach
yourself from the situation. Come back to writing when you have had time to reflect on
the matter and can express yourself calmly.
● Don’t put anything in writing that you would be ashamed to see reported on the front
page of the Wall Street Journal.
Style review and rewrite
Critical thinking and questioning choice of writing, scorecard:
● Divide and conquer, read aloud and listen to catch errors
● Start with old information, and end with a new most important element at the end?
● Subject, verb as close as possible, then object?
● Subject verb case match?,
● same verb tense?,
● dangling reference pronoun?
● Dangling this?
● Pronoun and name case match (plural singular)?
● Every noun has an article (a, an, the)?
● Modifier is close?
● Start with short, easily understood, and write longer at the end (logical causal
geography)?
● Signal posting, to signal readers with words and topics? Transition keywords on linkage?
● Can I say it with less word? Recycling and repetition of pronouns?
● Logic and theme?
● Causal writing?
● Are there ropes to connect across sentence by the theme? i.e. what?
● Less prepositional phrase?
● Not any passive?
● Less nominalization?
● Precise verbs instead?
● Convincing?
● Sufficiently interesting?
● Links to relevant material showing listening?
● Well positioning?
● Relevant?
● Significant?
● Differentiated content?
● Acknowledge both opponent and proponent thoughts?
● resumptive/ summative modifier?
● Parallelism? Not lost connection?
● Balance and symmetry?
● Climactic thumb, of the point at heavy end?
● Not magic but step by step causal?
● Focus on the main point and help the reader to get it quickly by staging?
● Everything means something?
● No parenthesis?
● Unclear antecedent?
● Concrete and not abstract?
● No technical jargon?
● Each paragraph only emphasizes one point?
● Used moments properly to prepare and emphasize?
● Causal thinking?
● Conversation style?
● Connected?
● Outlined?
● Used patterns for readability? (patterns means what the user expects)
Presentation tips:
● Preserve the word limit, read instructions carefully, identify the topic, field of inquiry and
argument advancing in the post, suggest broader state or applications of the piost
● Not over time limit, have longer version at disposal to discuss
● Attend events , ask questions, and attend public activities
● Listen to the question, then count to 3 before answering, pause, it is an interesting
question, let me think about it, and I will come back to you later, we can try that let me jut
it down
● Get credit for your tangible difference
● Set stage with agreeable items, interesting items later
● Sparse clear slides
● Space: define, emphasis, pause/ stress
● Work hard to communicate your work,
● make sure the audience: cares about your work, understands how you answer it, knows
why they should believe you, and walk out with something learnt
● Practice a lot, and give talks anywhere you can, slow down, not overwhelm
● Connect objective, model and results, and point out advantage
● Answer by: I understand, however,…, that might be true, but…, open ended question,
applaude, listening
Better Writing tips
● 1 . Layer Your Message. The same is true of meetings or all-hands where we tend to
have one topic or theme and then several points we plan to cover, and then we lay out
the detailed content.
● 2. Consider the Second Order Audience. Focusing your message into a format that is
readily repeatable by others with high fidelity can be a huge advantage, for example
short memorable phrases like “Camera First” or “Ship Love.”
● 3. Communicate Defensively. You need to consider the most cynical interpretation of
your message before you say anything. So before you communicate, take the time to
consider all parts of your audience and how you might be misinterpreted and then refine
your message to reduce the likelihood of miscommunication.
● 4. Repetition is Key. Advertisers have known for a long time that ensuring someone
hears a critical message several times is key to them retaining it. Within any given
communication be sure to keep tying things back to the critical message. Mention the
key message several time in your text in multiple places.
● 5. Use Multiple Channels. People absorb information differently through different media
so if you want to ensure you’ve really reached everyone it is wise to get your message
out on many different ways.
● 6. Maintain Channels. All the right text is worthless if nobody reads it. Building and
maintaining strong channels of communication is critical to being able to communicate
effectively. If you wait until you need such channels, you are already too late. The
channels also have to be used frequently enough to stay well ranked, so investing in
regular, high-quality content production is important.
● 7. Communicate Early and Often. The most common mistake I see is leaders waiting to
say anything until they are certain what they are communicating is absolutely correct.
That sounds laudable but in practice it tends to slows down communication dramatically
and gives space for the rumor mill to run amok. In my experience, people would rather
hear about the current state of our understanding and have it revised as we learn more
than hear nothing at all. People can deal with imperfect information but they cannot
stand information insecurity.
● 8. Debug Miscommunication. When I’m doing a poor job of communicating it can feel like
I’m pushing with a rope. I have some clear vision in my head and people just aren’t doing
what I expect. It can be a frustrating experience and it is tempting to blame the audience
for not understanding. But make no mistake, when this happens, it is your fault. You
have to sit down and ask questions from a place of humility to hear what they took away
from what you said. Take full responsibility for any discrepancy from what you intended
and make corrections with your entire audience.
Essential Elements of Writing
● Main part of writing contains Content + Expression. Content means you have
something to say, and Expression means you are saying it well.
● Define & Redefine: Key concepts are like the threads and knots in our communication
fabric. Defining concepts will put words into people’s mouth, and expand our human
language’s capacity. Once you define it, it becomes something more real, a concise
carrier for something complex. You can reference it, debate it, challenge it, so on and so
forth. Once you redefine an existing concept, you bring clarity and oftentimes
attention-grabbing tensions for free.
● Analogy: it bridges a new concept to a familiar one. It gives a framing to compare things
in parallel. e.g. think about when people say “drink from fire hose”, “swallow a frog”.
Better yet, make the analogy peculiar so it is stuck in people’s minds. For example,
“biggest elephant in the room”. Good analogy can also be a lot of fun.
● Visualize: working in IT industry, we often find ourselves living in an abstract world.
What we built often can’t be seen, touched, smelt or felt like in physical world. For
example, given the human hours put in, our ads delivery system could be as magnificent
as the Notre-Dame if visualized well, but you don’t easily feel that way. Connecting with
their life experience will go a long way to get your point across. Visualization often needs
analogy, but analogy does not have to always be visual.
● Use formula: mathematics formula is a highly condensed formulation. It saves space to
express relationships elegantly. e.g. A = B + C. You can also extend this to other
mathematical tools, such as coordinates, theorems, etc. Don’t fear going too far. If you
err, you’ll survive. Ask for help. Fight fear with fear. Make it scarier to not do it than to do
it.
● Dialog: a note/post is like a one-man’s show. You own the stage and the full attention
span. Your readers can walk away, but they can never interrupt. Using conversational
dialog will make your writing 1 0X engaging. It feels like you are talking to the reader face
to face. Use second person pronouns (you, your, yours), confront your readers, raise
questions, and answer them.
● Drama/Tension/Suspense: creating drama and tension works for operas, it works for
our workplace writing too. Challenging and negating a popular mis-conception will
instantly catch people’s eyes. Ask questions in the beginning to create suspense and
inspire the desire to follow the rabbit trail looking for answers.
● Concise: a powerful point does not need a lot of words to make. On the contrary, the
shorter, the better. In the same spirit as the 1 40 char limit in twitter, apply a similar limit
for each sentence you have. Avoid unnecessary clauses, avoid excessive words. Make
every word count. I mean it. Really.
Writing Is Thinking.
● Write a lot: I find it valuable to write even if only for my own benefit. Writing is a linear
process that forces a tangle of loose connections in your brain through a narrow
aperture exposing them to much greater scrutiny. In my experience, discussion expands
the space of possibilities while writing reduces it to its most essential components. I
know of no more scalable way to engage a large audience than the written word.
● Have an Editor: We had to write a lot. He didn’t care what we wrote as long as we
produced pages. It is very rare that I publish something even to relatively small groups
without having an editor review it. A good editor is anyone who tells you when something
sucks. If you plan to write as much as I am suggesting, you’ll want to find several editors
to spread out the load. While great editors help you see your writing from another
perspective they are not responsible for the final content. That means don’t take their
notes unless you really believe them.
● Never abdicate responsibility for your content to your editors. Writing, much like
programming, illustrating, or any other creative pursuit, is best done without interruptions
so you can occupy the entirety of your consciousness with the exploration at hand. My
advice is to set aside dedicated time on your calendar, disable notifications, set your
phone aside, and commit to your keyboard (or typewriter, or pen & paper, or whatever).
● Murder your darlings. One of the most common problems I run into when I write is that
I get very attached to some specific structure or turn of phrase and I find myself
struggling as I unwittingly contort the rest of the content around it. When I hit a wall in my
writing, the most likely cause is that I need to revisit some fundamental part of the
document. More precisely, I need to revisit some fundamental part of my thinking. All of
the above is half the equation, the other half is actually putting your writing into the world
and seeing the response. You don’t have to go find the biggest group in the world; just
writing for your own team or even posting internally on your wall are enough. Writing with
the intent to publish will improve your writing as it tricks your brain into applying greater
scrutiny to the ideas. Once you start writing it will be hard to stop.
Structure of writing
● Every note starts with at least two things: a purpose, and an audience. The purpose is
the answer to “Why are you writing this note?” Some examples:
○ Data Exploration: This is the most popular type of note among data scientists,
meant to shed light on a lesser-known ecosystem, product area, etc.
○ Interesting Finding: You discovered something crazy. It’s interesting enough
that it deserves a dedicated note. Explain the finding and its various implications.
○ Strong Opinion: You have a strong opinion about something. Write a note to
persuade people to act on it!
○ Look-at-what-I-did-this-half: PSC is here. You need to rattle off all the things
you or your team did, but hopefully also share the evolution and direction of your
product.
Focus on the audience
● The audience is the answer to “Who is this note for?”
● Having an audience in mind when you write will help you bridge the gap between
readers and your note, and make your note more applicable to them and their job.
● Ideally, you’re writing about something that’s important enough to interest a broad
audience. Why? For impact! It will also force you to frame findings in a more general and
impactful way, and to cut back on more minute or tangential findings.
● Try to target non-technical people when describing your work. Don't be afraid to
over-explain, and avoid complicated tech or data science jargon or team-specific
acronyms. Lean towards using words that anyone in the company would understand.
● Everyone loves a good story. So why not indulge your readers with a powerful tale that
keeps them gripping at their seats?
Narration
Imagine your note is a museum, and the contents of your note are all the cool artifacts sprawled
across the museum. You want your visitors to get the most out of their visit, right? So you’ll
probably give them a map when they enter, or even better, a guided tour.
Story Arcs
Many stories follow an "arc", or a multi-stage journey that looks roughly like this:
● Introduce the protagonist. Every story has a person you're following along the way,
maybe rooting for or empathizing with. It doesn't have to be a human – feel free to
personify objects, apps, features, etc.
● Introduce tension. Something unexpected happens to the protagonist. You can
introduce an antagonist, or some other element in the story that adds drama and
changes the course of events.
● Describe the turning point. Things are different now. Describe this "new normal" and
what it means for the protagonist moving forward.
● Reach resolution. Wrap up the story in a satisfying way. You can describe how the
protagonist rose above their challenge, or adopted a new perspective on things. Solidify
the outcomes and themes of your story.
● To help readers connect with your work, give them familiar ground. Something they
already know about that they can picture in the back of their minds when interpreting
your achievements or findings. This could be screenshots from your product, design
mocks, etc. It could also be clever analogies.
● Empathy is a powerful thing. Make your readers feel like they’re experiencing
something first hand, and they won’t be able to put your note down.
Writing tips
● Without a clear purpose, charts can confuse or wear down your readers. Use charts to
support or emphasize an important point you're trying to make. Or to make your findings
easier to digest.
● Try to keep your paragraphs under 6 lines!
● You should also spoon-feed your readers by playing with paragraph and sentence
lengths, and by interlacing quotes.
● Don’t Bury the Lede. Make one point per paragraph, and lead the paragraph with your
point. It will also help people skim.
● Break Down your Wall of Text. Readers feel uneasy when they see a screen-worth of
text. Fix that by including at least one interesting visual element per screen view as “eye
candy” to look forward to. It could be a quote, an image, bullets, etc. Doesn’t matter, as
long as it breaks up the text.
● Enforce Structure with Headings
● Use section headings to structure your note and steer your storyline.
● Great section titles can also accentuate a theme in your note, or contribute towards
making it dramatic or funny. Get creative!
● TL;DRs are great – when they’re short. Don’t troll your readers with gigantic TL;DRs at
the top of your note! If you’re going to summarize, do it with just a few short bullets. See
this note’s TL;DR a bit further down.
● Titles and Covers Photos. Nothing ruins a note more than terrible title and cover photo.
You already spent 1 0+ hours on your note – why not spend an extra 30 minutes to make
the most visible parts amazing? Picking a Great Title
● Titles set the tone for your note. A funny title means the note will be fun to read . A
complicated title does the opposite.
● Your title also tells readers if the note will be relevant to them. A cryptic or team-specific
title will be relevant to very few people , unlike broad, no-context-required titles.
● Countdown! Popularized by Buzzfeed, the “1 0 things you didn’t know about Justin
Bieber” title is catchy, and lets the reader know what to expect from the note. State your
opinion! For notes where you have a strong opinion and are trying to convince people to
act on it, you can use that opinion (or an allusion to it) as your title. State your interesting
finding! You found something crazy. Tell people what it is in your title.
● Picking a Great Cover Photo.
● People definitely judge books by their cover, and notes are no different. You should do
everything in your power to get someone to click into your note – don’t neglect your
cover photo!
● Find something related to your topic, but that's also fun to look at.
● If you can't find a good cover, create your own! (I use Sketch, Photoshop, or Illustrator)
● Please, avoid crappy stock photos at all costs.
Great notes have...
● Great stories. They employ awesome narration that feels like a tour guide is
spoon-feeding you the content. They use story arcs that introduce drama and suspense
to your content. They use elements of real life to immerse readers and give them
something familiar to latch onto.
● Great writing. They have short paragraphs that lead with the point and are interlaced
with visual breaks. They have section headings that add structure and steer the story.
They have purposeful charts and short TL;DRs.
● Great titles and cover photos. You get the point.
● Get feedback! Ask a trusted colleague to read over your notes before you publish. She
may catch a big mistake, or pinpoint a better way to frame your arguments. That
feedback will also pay future dividends as it teaches you how to write better notes over
time.
Why writing?
● If you don’t want to be bombarded with questions via messenger, document what you
know. People will always have questions, so help them find answers.
● The more altruistic reason is to help the team(s) I work with scale. It’s no good for
anyone else if they’re blocked on a response from me via messenger. Another reason is
to reduce the company’s reliance on you (i.e. increase the “bus factor” of the team).
Otherwise, you wouldn’t even be able to go to sleep (much less go on PTO) without the
fear of an emergency where you are the only person who could debug the issue. I can’t
imagine how much more challenging transitioning to each new team would have been
had I not relentlessly documented everything.
● You can increase your scope beyond just being the knowledge hub or firefighter of your
team. The impact of being a knowledge hub or firefighter is bounded by your individual
time and energy, so you will eventually hit a ceiling on your impact and scope.
● It should be well-structured. Use a logical hierarchy.
○ A key structuring strategy is to start general and go specific.
○ Use the right level of abstraction. It’s important to establish the purpose of
something before describing something more obscure.
○ For example, describe what is X (its role, usage, etc) before describing the
specific command line incantations to make it build and run.
○ Link to the right resources and don’t repeat yourself (DRY). Know your
customers. Who are you writing the Dex for? Think from their perspectives, what
structure and content would be the most helpful for them? Is it too specific or not
specific enough? Iterate on feedback. The initial draft will inevitably omit key
details, have a confusing structure, and generally be harder to use.
○ Proactively ask for feedback from people you work with on both the breadth of
content and the structure of the Dex. Whenever people are confused by it or
don’t have their questions answered by the Dex, take that as an opportunity to
improve it.
○ Even more than with code, you should be constantly refactoring your Dex to
make it better. Whereas your code might have a handful of eyes on it in its
lifetime, a high quality Dex could have hundreds or thousands. Put together the
shortest, most organized reference to help your customers be the most effective.
The structure and organization of your Dex can matter just as much, if not more,
than the content within.
1 0 TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE WRITING
● Highlight key takeaways upfront. Within the first or second paragraph establish a strong
claim, including a quantification of impact or opportunity sizing whenever possible.
● Start with a strong title and begin with high-level context. Once readers understand
the subject and importance, provide a smooth-yet-rapid transition into the details.
● Use sections and sub-sections. Limit yourself to 3 short paragraphs before introducing
a new section or sub-section. These visual breaks facilitate structured discourse and
help readers complete longer posts.
● Trim the word count. Longer posts are less likely to be read, completed, or understood.
Consider each sentence and paragraph, examining where you might condense or cut
content.
● Be open about assumptions and limitations, and describe their implications with
nuance. Sharing why you believe the results should still (or won't) generalize more
broadly builds confidence among readers.
● Write out terms before transitioning to the use of acronyms. This will introduce
audiences to important concepts, and reduce confusion.
● Embed links. You will simultaneously trim content length and improve the flow of your
writing with no loss in functionality.
● Simplify graphics. Graphics should be easy to interpret, increase trust, and facilitate
consensus-building. Visual complexity can be pushed into supplementary materials.
● Finish strong. Establish a clear call-to-action or short outline for next steps. Also point
readers to relevant wikis, code, etc. for those who want to learn more.
● Post and share into groups with care. Choose open groups, but avoid FYI or
1 000-person groups. If you have strong content, trust that colleagues will amplify your
work and share it broadly.
5 TIPS TO FACILITATE FEEDBACK
We often rely upon constructive feedback to strengthen our writing. Here are five tips to facilitate
feedback on your drafts.
● Establish timing expectations with colleagues. It's as simple as asking “Would you
have a chance to read over a draft post on {Topic X} if I shared it with you Tuesday
afternoon?”
● Share a solid draft. Make it easy & enjoyable for others to provide valuable feedback by
having already incorporated the aforementioned tips for effective writing.
● Invite perspectives from beyond your team. Integrating feedback from a broad set of
colleagues — orgs & roles — is essential for drafts regarding strategy, methodology, and
technical approaches.
● Snowball support, fast. Start with a few colleagues. Expedite your efforts to integrate
their feedback, then request a subsequent wave of colleagues to provide additional
feedback on your draft post.
● Reciprocate support. If you're generous in your support of colleagues, they will make
time to support you as well.
Writing Tips
● Show and not tell in writing by describing what happened.
● Write evidence based and not opinion.
● show what you have done in similar situations to show.
● Remove word redundancy.
● Write concisely.
● Be plain spoken no buzz words.
● Give a chronological context.
● Writing helps you to pay attention, soften, wake up and think clearly. Write about
anythings and you are safe as far as nobody reads it.
● Writing is fun and amusing.
● Break writings into short assignments.
● Breath deep and quietly and let mind wander.
● To write you need to overcome resistance.
● Start by writing only one paragraph first.
Writing Process from Bird by Bird
● Writing a novel is like driving at night you dont have to see every picture but only a little
bit in front of you. take it bird by bird.
● Always start with shitty really shitty draft writing.
● Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.
● You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something— anything—down on paper. A
friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down.
● The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up.
● You try to say what you have to say more accurately.
● And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, see if it’s loose or
cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
● What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the
voices in my head.
● Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you
cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty
first draft.
● This is priceless. Perfectionism, on the other hand, will only drive you mad. Your day’s
work might turn out to have been a mess. So what?
● I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough,
hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die.
● The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at
their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while
they’re doing it.
● Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and
life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California).
● Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up.
● But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
● Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground—you can still discover new treasures under all those
piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip.
● In any case, the bottom line is that if you want to write, you get to, but you probably won’t
be able to get very far if you don’t start trying to get over your perfectionism.
● What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children
was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are
here—and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.
● understand the character of your story, live with them, learn about their past, their future,
how they live and talk ad what they want.
● You should give a reason to writers to continue reading.
● John Gardner wrote that the writer is creating a dream into which he or she invites the
reader, and that the dream must be vivid and continuous. I tell my students to write this
down—that the dream must be vivid and continuous—because it is so crucial.
● Outside the classroom, you don’t get to sit next to your readers and explain little things
you left out, or fill in details that would have made the action more interesting or
believable.
● The material has got to work on its own, and the dream must be vivid and continuous.
● Your characters need to have natural dialogue in your writing. You need a dialect of
thesis and antithesis in your writing.
● I think my students believe that when a published writer finishes something, she crosses
the last t, pushes back from the desk, yawns, stretches, and smiles. I do not know
anyone who has ever done this, not even once.
● What happens instead is that you’ve gone over and over something so many times,
and you’ve weeded and pruned and rewritten, and the person who reads your work for
you has given you great suggestions that you have mostly taken— and then finally
something inside you just says it’s time to get on to the next thing.
● Of course, there will always be more you could do, but you have to remind yourself
that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
● Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some
meaning therein. But you can’t do that if you’re not respectful.
● You have to have something of importance and constructive. Write on something that is
of importance to you like charity. on every single morning when I sit down at my desk.
● So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer—please help me get out of the way so
I can write what wants to be written. Sometimes ritual quiets the racket.
● Try conscious breathing; I start to worry that a nice long discussion of aromatherapy is
right around the corner. But these slow conscious breathers are on to something,
because if you try to follow your breath for a while, it will ground you in relative silence.
Writing correct english
● Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's.
● In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each
term except the last.
● Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas.
● Place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause.
● Do not join independent clauses with a comma.
● Do not break sentences in two.
● Use a colon after an independent clause to introduce a list of particulars, an appositive,
an amplification, or an illustrative quotation.
● Use a dash to set off an abrupt break or interruption and to announce a long appositive
or summary.
● The number of the subject determines the number of the verb.
● Use the proper case of pronoun.
● A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.
II. ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES OF COMPOSITION
● Choose a suitable design and hold to it.
● Make the paragraph the unit of composition.
● Use the active voice.
● Put statements in positive form.
● Use definite, specific, concrete language.
● Omit needless words.
● Avoid a succession of loose sentences.
● Express coordinate ideas in similar form.
● Keep related words together.
● In summaries, keep to one tense.
● Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.
III. A FEW MATTERS OF FORM 34
IV. WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS COMMONLY MISUSED 39 V. AN APPROACH TO STYLE
(With a List of Reminders)
● Place yourself in the background.
● Write in a way that comes naturally.
● Work from a suitable design.
● Write with nouns and verbs.
● Revise and rewrite.
● Do not overwrite.
● Do not overstate.
● Avoid the use of qualifiers.
● Do not affect a breezy manner.
● Use orthodox spelling.
● Do not explain too much.
● Do not construct awkward adverbs.
● Make sure the reader knows who is speaking.
● Avoid fancy words.
● Do not use dialect unless your ear is good.
● Be clear.
● Do not inject opinion.
● Use figures of speech sparingly.
● Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity.
● Avoid foreign languages.
● Prefer the standard to the offbeat.
Style takeaways
● You can use a common motif for writing different types of texts, starting with sentences
through writing a book.
● For long form writing, open with a shared context or problem, insert a middle, and end
emphatically.
● From right to left as you write, shift from the familiar, simple to the more complex,
unfamiliar information. You can do this in the space of a sentence, a paragraph, or a
section in your writing.
● Write in active voice. Use passive voice when you need it or when it will add to the grace
and style of the writing.
● Tell a story with a character; follow the subject-verb-object motif. Use your subject as a
character, make it do something; keep the subject-verb-object as tightly knit as you can.
● Align your subject as the “topic” of the text you write. Great if you can use a real
character, otherwise, an abstract concept or if your topic is an abstract concept, use it as
a character just as you would name a concrete character.
● When you write the introduction section for larger pieces (story, essay, nonfiction,
research report), start with either a shared context or a problem.
● The shared context should be common knowledge; start with the shared context, and
immediately contradict it with “but” or “however” to introduce a problem.
● Decide if the problem is a real world actionable problem or if it is a theoretical,
conceptual problem.
○ If it is a real world actionable problem, introduce a cost that the reader has to pay
for the consequence by addressing a “so what?” question;
○ if it is a conceptual problem, then write about a larger issue where the problem
introduced was an instance, and let the reader decide.
● End your sentence emphatically.
● Write your sentences in a sequence.
● The opening sentences introduces the topic, and succeeding sentences qualify that
topic.
● While this is your desirable cohesion, you also want your sentences to be coherent as a
whole.
● In order to be coherent, you arrange the sentences to make sense as a whole.
Coherence should be both local (sentence through paragraphs) and global (sections
through the document).
Style summary
● 1 . Understanding Style
○ The two key principles of the book are: (1 ) it is good to write clearly, and (2)
anyone can write clearly. Not everyone agrees!
○ The biggest reason for unclear writing is that we are ignorant of how others read
our writing.
○ If you think about these principles while you draft, you may never draft anything.
● 2. Correctness
○ There are three kinds of rules:
■ (1 ) the Real Rules,
■ (2) the rules of Standard English, and
■ (3) invented rules (either folklore or elegant options).
○ If competent writers violate an alleged rule, then it really has no force. Instead of
blind obedience to the rules, we should follow selective observance. It helps to
know more about the invented rules than the rule-mongers do.
● 3. Actions
● Because readers prefer that most subjects be characters and most verbs be actions,
○ (1 ) match the important actions in your sentences to verbs, and
○ (2) make the characters in your story their subjects. This is because readers
prefer that most subjects be characters and most verbs be actions.
● Revising involves a three-step process:
○ (1 ) diagnose,
○ (2) analyze, and
○ (3) revise.
4. Characters
● Readers want
○ (1 ) actions in verbs, but even more they want
○ (2) characters as their subjects. You must make the subjects of most of your
verbs short, specific, and concrete.
● When dealing with abstract concept, turn them into virtual characters by making them
the subjects of verbs that tell a story.
● Many writers are too dependent on passive verbs, but it can have important functions
(e.g., not knowing the subject of the action, shifting information to the end of the
sentence, or focusing the reader’s attention on another character).
● Complex style may be necessary
○ (1 ) to express complex ideas precisely, or it may needlessly
○ (2) complicate simple ideas or
○ (3) complicate already complex ideas.
5. Cohesion and Coherence
● Sequences of sentences are cohesive when there is a sense of flow between how each
sentence ends and the next begins.
● You should begin sentences with information familiar to your readers and end sentences
with information readers cannot anticipate.
● A whole passage is coherent when the reader has a sense of the whole, depending on
how all the sentences in a passage cumulatively begin.
● Readers want to see topics and subject/characters in the same words; in most
sentences, start with the subject and make it the topic of the sentence.
6. Emphasis
● Use the end of your sentences to manage two kinds of difficulty:
○ (1 ) long and complex phrases and clauses;
○ (2) new information (particularly unfamiliar technical terms).
● The first few words of a sentence offer a point of view, the last view can emphasize
particular words to stress.
● Help readers identify concepts running through a passage by repeating them
○ (1 ) as topics of sentences (usually as subjects), and
○ (2) as themes elsewhere in a passion (nouns, verbs, adjectives).
7. Concision
● Delete words that
○ (1 ) mean little or nothing, that
○ (2) repeat the meaning of other words, or that
○ (3) are implied by other words.
● Replace a phrase with a word, and change negatives to affirmatives.
● Use metadiscourse discerningly to
○ (1 ) guide readers through your text (e.g., first, second, third; therefore, on the
other hand, etc.) and
○ (2) to hedge your certainty as needed (e.g., perhaps, seems, could).
8. Shape
● Quickly get readers to
○ (1 ) the subject of your main clause and
○ (2) past that subject to its verb and object.
● Therefore avoid long introductory phrase and clauses; long subjects; and interruptions
between subjects and verbs, and between verbs and objects.
● When you write a long sentence, extend it with the use of resumptive, summative, and
free modifiers (but don’t dangle it).
● Try to coordinate your sentences so that they go from shorter to longer, from simpler to
more complex.
9. Elegance
● The most striking feature of elegant writing is balanced sentence structure.
● You can balance one part of a sentence against another by coordinating them (with and,
or, but, and yet); you can also balance noncoordinated phrases and clauses.
● Think about the length of your sentences only if they are all longer than about 30 words
or shorter than 1 5.
1 0. The Ethics of Style
● Unclear writing can be the result of unintended obscurity or intentional misdirection.
● The First Principle of Ethical Writing: we write well when we would willingly experience
what our readers do when they read what we’ve written.
● Write to others as you would have others write to you.
● We owe readers an ethical duty to write precise and nuanced prose, but we ought not
assume that they owe us an indefinite amount of their time to unpack it.
● Clarity is almost an unnatural act. It has to be learned, sometimes painfully.
Ten Principles for Writing Clearly
● Distinguish real grammatical rules from folklore.
● Use subjects to name the characters in your story, avoiding abstractions.
● Use verbs to name characters’ important actions, identifying actions and avoiding
nominalizations.
● Open your sentences with familiar units of information, utilizing introductory fragments
and subordinate clauses at the beginnings of sentences.
● Get to the main verb quickly:
● Avoid long, complicated introductory phrases and clauses.
● Avoid long abstract subjects.
● Avoid interrupting the subject-verb connection.
● Push new, complex units of information to the end of the sentence, providing transitions
to get to them.
● Begin sentences constituting a passage with consistent topic/subjects.
● Be concise:
● Cut meaningless and repeated words and obvious implications and clichés.
● Put the meaning of phrases into one or two words.
● Prefer affirmative sentences to negative ones.
● Control Sprawl:
● Don’t take more than one subordinate clause onto another.
● Extend a sentence with resumptive, summative, and free modifiers.
● Extend a sentence with coordinate structures after verbs.
● Above all, write to others as you would have others write to you.
● Ten Principles for Writing Coherently
● In your introduction, motivate readers to read carefully by stating a problem they should
care about.
● Make your point clearly, the solution to the problem, usually at the end of the
introduction.
● In that point, introduce the important concepts that you will develop in what follows.
● Make it clear where each part/section begins and ends.
● Make everything that follows relevant to your point.
● Order parts in a way that makes clear and visible sense to your readers.
● Open each part/section with its own short introductory segment.
● Put the point of each part/section at the end of that opening segment.
● Begin sentences constituting a passage with consistent topic/subjects.
● Create cohesive old/new links between sentences.
Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, by Joseph M Williams
● Opening comments
● The book rests on two principles: Its good to write clearly, and anyone can.
● The second half is understandably easier said than done.
● The overall disclaimer given is that this text is not about writing, it is about rewriting.
Principles are useful before and after we write, but help no one caught up in the act of
writing.
○ 1 . Understanding Style
■ Avoid the “ese” (legalese)- “intended or not, it is the style of pretension
and intimidation, a kind of exclusionary language that a democratic
society cannot tolerate as its standard of civic discourse.
○ 2. Correctness
■ There are rules that designate the standard structure of English, rules that
define the standard written form, and then there are rules that were
invented by grammarians about trivial points of usage.
● Selective observance- good grammar is defined not by random errors but by the
consensus of usage established by the habitual usage of writers.
● Example- if vast numbers of otherwise careful writers choose to begin a sentence with
the word but and the majority of educated careful readers don’t notice, then regardless
of what any editor says, beginning a sentence with the word but can be neither a
grammatical error nor a violation of good usage.
● It is impossible to obey all the rules all the time
3/4. Clarity in Actions & Characters
● Readers feel they are reading clear prose when you meet two expectations:
○ You use subjects to name your central characters
○ You express their most important actions as verbs
● When you consistently write sentences whose subjects are characters (agents or doers),
your readers will judge your prose to be clearer
● Subjects may be characters and verbs may be actions, but those are not fixed actions.
We can turn verbs into nouns;
○ we can move characters into different positions allowing them to be dropped
altogether.
○ We can also turn characters into verbs (chair a meeting, guard a prisoner).
○ While we are free to do this, readers prefer sentences whose parts fit traditional
“ninth grade definitions”: subjects as characters, actions as verbs
○ As a result the readers have fewer reads to read, its more concrete, sequence is
more coherent, and logical connections are clear.
● The best place for important characters is in the subject of a verb, especially when the
character is the agent of the actions expressed by the verb
● In our writing:
○ Most readers prefer separate flesh-and-bone characters as subjects.
● But when writing about concepts, treat as if they are real by making them the subjects of
verbs that seem to indicate an action.
● “Intention has a complex cognitive component”
5 Cohesion and Coherence
● Choose the passive when you don’t know who did it, your readers don’t care who did it,
or you don’t want them to know who did it. Use a passive if it lets you rewrite a long
subject into a short one. When convenient, rewrite ling compound noun phrases.
● With every sequence of sentences that we write we have to find the best trade off
between the principles that make individual sentences clear and the principles that give
a passage of sentences a sense of a cohesive flow. But in that compromise we always
give priority to those features of style that help readers create a sense of cohesion.
Readers may understand individual sentences just fine, but if they cannot see how they
hang together, those individual clear sentences will add up to no coherently cumulative
meaning.
● Words like furthermore hence and but help the reader see real connection but if you are
using more than 3 per page examine your writing.
● You may trying to impose a factitious cohesion on a passage that is intrinsically coherent
● Readers impose coherence when they see two things:
○ They can identify topics of sentences easily
○ They can see how topics hang together as a logical set
6. Point of View
● Artful misdirection
7. Emphasis
● Readers best comprehend long complex units after they have read a relatively short and
clear subject and verb sequence. Don’t start a sentence by forcing the, to go through a
list of items, conditions, or abstractions.
● When readers see a technical term for the first time, particularly an unfamiliar term, they
best grasp that term if it appears at the end of a sentence
● Readers pay attention to the last few words of a sentence that introduces a passage of
sentences. These words signal the central concepts to follow.
8. Concision
● Don’t use words whose meaning adds nothing to the sentence
● When you use a familiar pair of adjectives, your readers probably need only one of them
(full and complete, hope and trust)
● When a word implies its modifier, drop the modifier (continue on, return back to,
penetrate into)
● When a general category word is attached to a specific modifier, drop the category word
(large in size, unusual in nature, round in shape)
● Don’t tell your readers what you are certain they already know
● Look for a word that says the same thing as a phrase or a clause
● To be direct, choose the affirmative
● The difference between the experienced and inexperienced writer is that the
experienced writer knows that summarizing is a good idea and does it deliberately but
also knows when to discard it from the final draft. The inexperienced writer has to learn
to use summary not as an end in itself, but in the service of analysis and argument.
9. Shape
● Readers want to get from the subject to the main clause quickly, help them by keeping
introductory phrases short, breaking them into their own sentences, or moving them to
the ends of their sentences.
● One clause per sentence
● Don’t break the link between the subject and the verb with a clause
1 0. Elegance Summary of summaries
● 1 . Mark your style direct by putting characters in your subjects, then join them
immediately with verbs naming significant actions
● 2. Make your style emphatic by ending sentences on you most rhetorically salient words
● 3. Create flow by maintaining crucial connections between major grammatical elements
● 4. Make prose cohesive and coherent by helping your readers see how sentences hang
together
● 5. Make sentences concise by reducing redundancy
Writing Tips from Bird by Bird
● On why writing matters?It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t
stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people
who are together on that ship.
● If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will
probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work.
Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry
about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent
or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer,
you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always
subversive. In your writing use examples to show and not to tell. The best solution is not
only to disguise and change as many characteristics as you can but also to make the
fictional person is composite.
● Write about that time in your life when you were so intensely interested in the world,
when your powers of observation were at their mostacute, when you felt things so
deeply. Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to
empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence
and insight and compassion. Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. writing
from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the
ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and
truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible
sense of isolation that we have all had too much of. Try to write in a directly emotional
way, instead of being too subtle or oblique.
● To be a good writer you need to take a lot of notes. Make a lemonade from every lemon
in your life. Just because you have not been a great writer does not mean you cant be a
great writer in the future. You have to start from somewhere fake it without fear to make
it. Mind and family have strong tactical advantages to protect you and the best way to
win is to force self confidence and confidence in doing the work. Be ready to give
yourself a break. In your writing rather than telling wha to do show them how you do it
with describing all the details.
● They need attention. They need someone to respond to their work as honestly as
possible but without being abusive or diminishing. So in my comments I focused on the
fact that the author had tried something so difficult, had taken such a risk. I told him that
the best possible thing was to shoot high and make mistakes, and that when he was old,
or dying, he was almost certainly not going to say, "God! I’m so glad I took so few
risks! I’m so glad I kept shooting so low!" I told him to plow ahead, write it one more
time, and then get to work on something else.
● On having a writing group. The fact that they’re going to meet means that they have to
get a certain amount of work finished. Also, an occupational hazard of writing is that
you’ll have bad days. You feel not only totally alone but also that everyone else is at a
party. But if you talk to other people who write, you remember that this feeling is part of
the process, that it’s inevitable. Writers tend to be so paranoid about talking about
their work because no one, including us, really understands how it works. But it can
help a great deal if you have someone you can call when you need a pep talk, someone
you have learned to trust, someone who is honest and generous and who won’t jinx you.
● On a bad day you also don’t need a lot of advice. You just need a little empathy and
affirmation. You need to feel once again that other people have confidence in you.
The members of your writing group can often offer just that. So how do you start one?
One way is to join a creative-writing class and to ask the people whose work you most
love and with whom you may have some rapport if they want to begin meeting once a
month, to hear and support each other’s work, gossip a little, and talk about writing in
general. I made sounds of empathy and reminded her that she’d been this stuck before.
Short assignments, I whispered. Shitty first drafts. The person may not have an answer
to what is missing or annoying about the piece, but writing is so often about making
mistakes and feeling lost. There are probably a number of ways to tell your story right,
and someone else may be able to tell you whether or not you’ve found one of these
ways.
● But feedback from someone I’m close to gives me confidence, or at least it gives me
time to improve. Imagine that you are getting ready for a party and there is a person at
your house who can check you out and assure you that you look wonderful or,
conversely, that you actually do look a little tiny tiny tiny bit heavier than usual in this one
particular dress or suit or that red makes you look just a bit like you have sarcoptic
mange. Criticism is hard to get and you are blessed if someone can sit with you and go
through your writing page by page.
● Finding a writing partner. So if you are in a class, look around, see if there’s someone
whose work you’ve admired, who seems to be at about the same level as you. Then you
can ask him or her if he or she wants to meet for a cup of coffee and see if you can work
with each other. It’s like asking for a date, so while you are doing this, you will probably
be rolfed by all your most heinous memories of seventh and eighth grade. If the person
says no, it’s good to wait until you get inside your car before you fall apart completely.
"because she’s teaching you how to live." I remind myself of this when I cannot get any
work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus.
To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence. Time is
so full for people who are dying in a conscious way, full in the way that life is for children.
Dying tomorrow. What should I do today?" Then I can decide.
● But now you are having some days or weeks of emptiness, as if suddenly the writing
gods are saying, "Enough! Don’t bother me! I have given to you until it hurts! Please. I’ve
got problems of my own." The problem is acceptance, which is something we’re taught
not to do. We’re taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate
unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given—that you
are not in a productive creative period—you free yourself to begin filling up again. I
encourage my students at times like these to get one page of anything written, three
hundred words of memories or dreams or stream ofconsciousness on how much they
hate writing—just for the hell of it, just to keep their fingers from becoming too arthritic,
just because they have made a commitment to try to write three hundred words every
day. Then, on bad days and weeks, let things go at that.
● for the rest of the morning or go to the beach or just really participate in ordinary life. Any
of these will begin the process of filling me back up with observations, flavors, ideas,
visions, memories. I might want to write on my last day on earth, but I’d also be aware of
other options that would feel at least as pressing. I would want to keep whatever I did
simple, I think. And I would want to be present. In the beginning, when you’re first
starting out, there are a million reasons not to write, to give up. That is why it is of
extreme importance to make a commitment to finishing sections and stories, to driving
through to the finish. The discouraging voices will hound you. Search and find your
voice.
● We feel bad about ourselves and think we suck because we usually don't see how
others suck in public and private but reading books make it clear that others such as
writers and entrepreneurs suck as much as we do.
● On hateful critics after publishing. You need friends to commiserate And they really do
feel sick for you, and angry, and they know you feel like a wounded animal, a raging bull,
and they say the right things, that they love you and they love your book, and that it has
happened to them, a year ago or whenever. Because if you are a writer, it is going to
happen to you. This is the truth. It has happened to me, and if you get published, it is
almost certainly going to happen to you. But the fact of publication is the
acknowledgment from the community that you did your writing right. You acquire a rank
that you never lose. Now you’re a published writer, and you are in that rare position of
getting to make a living, such as it is, doing what you love best. That knowledge does
bring you a quiet joy. But eventually you have to sit down like every other writer and face
the blank page.
● The beginnings of a second or third book are full of spirit and confidence because you
have been published, and false starts and terror because now you have to prove
yourself again. People may find out that you were a flash in the pan, that it was all
beginner’s luck. What I know now is that you have to wear out all that dread by writing
long and hard and not stopping too often to admire yourself and your publishedness in
the mirror. "If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it." but
I am old and tough and can handle this sort remembered that if I wasn’t enough before
being asked toparticipate in this prestigious event, then participating wasn’t going to
make me enough. Being enough was going to have to be an inside job. of
disappointment.
● somebodyism—how most of us are raised to be somebodies and what a no-win game
that is to buy into, because while youmay turn out to be much more somebody than
somebody else, a lot of other people are going to be a lot more somebody than you. And
you are going to drive yourself crazy. said. "The world can’t give us peace. We can only
find it in our hearts." "I hate that," I said. "I know. But the good news is that by the same
token, the world can’t take it away." I think I’ve told my students every single thing I
know about writing. Short assignments, shitty first drafts, one-inch picture frames,
Polaroids, messes, mistakes, partners.
Writing Tips on clutter removal
● Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.
● Consider all the prepositions that are draped onto verbs that don't need any help.
● You'll find a surprising number of words that don't serve any purpose.
● There's no need to say, "At the present time we are experiencing precipitation."
● Clutter is the ponderous euphemism
● I would put brackets around any component in a piece of writing that wasn't doing useful
work.
● Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly.
● But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
● Writers must therefore constantly ask: What am I trying to say?
● Good writing doesn't come naturally, though most people obviously think it does.
● Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right
the first time, or even the third time.
● Remember this as a consolation in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard,
it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do.
The Reader is king writing sentence level Tips
● You are his servant. You serve the Reader information.
● You serve the Reader entertainment. You serve the Reader details of yourcompany's
recent merger or details of your experiences in drug rehab.
● In each case, as a writer you're working for the man (or the woman).
● Here's another way to think of this: Your writing is not about you.
● It's about the Reader.
● But there is one thing all Readers want: clear, concise, comprehensible sentences that
mean something to them.
○ Oh, Yes, There Will Be Grammar
○ This is where grammar comes in.
○ This is where word choice comes in.
● All you have to do is remember the Reader. Ask, "What's important to my Reader?" not
just, "What will get his attention?"
● And again, every rewrite contains the danger of lost meaning or lost information or even
the possibility you'll make the sentence factually incorrect.
● So while reworking for clarity, the writer must always keep a tight rein on accuracy and
meaning.
● Who cares? Making sentences meaningful to your reader.
○ Conjunctions that kill: subordination.
○ Movable objects: understanding phrases and clauses.
○ size matters: short versus long sentences.
○ Words gone wild: sentences that say nothing — or worse. Words gone mild:
choosing specific words over vague ones.
○ You will have been conjugating: other matters of tense.
○ The being and the doing are the killing of your writing: nominalization.
○ The the: not so definite definite articles.
○ The writer and his father lamented his ineptitude: unclear antecedents. To know
them is to hating them: faulty and funky parallels.
○ A frequently overstated case: the truth about adverbs. are your relative essential?
relative clauses.
○ Antique desk suitable for a lady with thick legs and large drawers: prepositional
phrases.
○ Dangler danger: participles and other danglers. The writing was ignored by the
reader: passives.
● In our active form, the action is the verb. In passive form, the verb emphasizes being
more than doing. That's what people mean when they say that passives are bad. Yes,
their point is overstated, but there's a big lump of truth at its center. Passives often
stink.
● Sometimes, the best way to fix bad passives is to restructure the passage. These
sentences are busy, they're abstract, they're a little confusing, and they take longer to
get to the point.
● Of course, there are times when these convoluted tenses capture your meaning and
mood exactly.
● But it's obvious that often the simplest verb tense is the best verb tense. I can't tell you
which tense to choose for your writing. No one can. But there's much to be learned by
professional writers' choices. Simple past tense is the standard form. It's a safe choice.
You can deviate from it, but unless you have a good reason to, maybe you shouldn't.
● Notice how, in that last example, the nominalized form might be preferable. That goes to
show you that a nominalization can be an excellent choice. But it can also be a terrible
choice. So keep an eye out for nominalizations. Think of each as an opportunity— a
chance to consider alternative, possibly better ways to structure your sentence.
● Sometimes you'll find that recasting them in simple subject-plus-verb form can make a
better experience for the Reader. Sometimes you'll want to leave them as they are.
But don't write off all nominalizations as bad. Without them, this whole chapter couldn't
have existed, because nominalization is itself a nominalization.
● Solution: Move the prepositional phrase in my pajamas closer to the pronoun it modifies:
I.
● Grammar isn't the only key to good sentence writing, of course. Word choice, common
sense, passion, information—all these elements and more are essential.
● Yet all great writing has one thing in common. It starts with a sentence. The sentence is
a microcosm of any written work, and understanding it means understanding writing
itself—how to structure ideas, how to emphasize what's important, how to make practical
use of grammar, how to cut the bull, and, above all, how to serve the almighty Reader. If
I live up to my goal of serving you well, that's what you'll learn here.
● As a writer, it's your job to organize information, to prioritize it with the Reader in mind, to
chop and add as you see fit. But only by fully understanding the mechanics of the
sentence can you do so in the best possible way.
● A lot of experts say that the best way to remember all the coordinating conjunctions is
with the acronym FANBOYS, which represents for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so.
● There's nothing wrong with putting the main point last. A main clause can come at the
beginning, middle, or end of a sentence. But it's usually a bad idea to beat down that
information by subordinating it.
● Read it aloud. Notice how, instinctively, your voice wants to rush through all the stuff
before the comma, then emphasize the stuff after the comma? That's because our
subordinating conjunction, before, tells you that what follows is not the main point. The
main point will come later, perhaps after a deep breath or a pause.
● If you find all this a little overwhelming, don't worry. Though it may take a while to get
comfortable with theses concepts, you need not immediately commit to memory every
subordinating conjunction and its potential hazards.
● Your goal is to start to recognize subordinating conjunctions in your writing and in your
reading—to see the power they afford you to serve your Reader. These words help you
organize your thoughts, say what you mean, emphasize what's most important, and
even create art. If that takes a while, it's time well spent.
● A clause is a unit that usually contains a subject and a verb. A phrase is a unit of one or
more words that works as either a noun, a verb, an adverb, an adjective, or something
called a prepositional phrase.
○ Phrases are even more portable than clauses and their placement is even more
likely to affect your meaning.
○ For now, begin to think of phrases and clauses as the basic parts of every
sentence.
○ Start to identify them. Start to see other ways phrases and clauses could work
within the same sentence. Now let's move on to something fun.
○ lot of people will tell you that the longer sentence is always the lesser sentence.
Some even say long sentences are an out-and-out no-no. But it's not that simple.
○ Personally, I have a strong bias in favor of short sentences. I believe that modern
sensibilities are more attuned to short sentences.
○ Another problem with our longer sentence: extra words can have a diluting effect.
Do you see unnecessary information in here? Is it really important to note that job
hunters hear and read this? Why stop there? We found the action in our how
clause and made it more meaningful by setting it up in a sentence with the main
clause you need.
○ By the way, don't feel bad if your sentences come out long and rambling at first.
For many people, that's just part of the writing process. I write some major
stinkers myself. It doesn't mean you're a bad writer or you lack talent. It just
means that your process for writing good sentences involves putting your messy
ideas on paper before cleaning them up.
○ I suppose some people organize all their thoughts in their head before putting
them on paper. Kudos to them. But it doesn't mean they're necessarily better
writers. There's nothing wrong with writing sentences that come out clunky at
first, as long as you can reread your own writing and see where revisions could
make your sentences better.
○ What to do, then, about this monstrous sentence? Often, the simplest solution is
to just drop all the conjunctions and fillers and parentheses and other connecting
devices and make simple sentences out of what's left. That is, isolate the clauses
and/or distinct ideas and form them into individual sentences. Now we can see
that the very essence of our bad sentence was actually a cluster of clear, simple
ideas that can be expressed clearly and simply. The beauty of boiling it down this
way is that now you can make more choices. You can rearrange the facts and
choose which ones to emphasize. Placement counts, too.
○ If you never plan to write a short sentence in your life—even if your hero is
Jonathan Coe, whose 1 3,995-word novel The Rotters' Club is all one
sentence—you should master the short sentence.
○ Doing so will give you better mastery of your long ones and will help you discover
ever-better ways of arranging words in order to create meaning and beauty.
○ I can't tell you how to write good metaphors. But I can offer you a sort of guiding
light to help you distinguish good metaphors from bad. You already know it: it's
the concept of Reader-serving writing versus writer-serving writing.
○ Of course, these edits are purely subjective. Creative writing need not be bound
by things like logic or clarity or common sense. But Reader-serving writing
requires that we at least consider such alternatives.
○ The point is: Pay attention to your words. Try not to zone out or become
hypnotized by the cliches that live in all our heads and that try to slip into
everyone's writing.
○ When you reread your writing, try to do so with a scrutinizing eye that asks, Did I
really mean that you don't have to do the math to figure out the number? Is there
really any meaning in a monotone shirred?. Or is there a better way to nail down
what I really mean? Remember this contrast because, though it seems like a
no-brainer now, choosing specific words can be harder than you think.
○ In fact, choosing generic, overly broad, noncommittal words is a very common
mistake of writers at all levels.
○ Writing, as they say, is about making choices. And the sentence is the tool the
fiction writer uses to show her Reader that she is fully committed to the choices
she has made. It's the place where the writer of features or news demonstrates
that she made an effort to pay attention to details in order to bring the Reader the
full experience. Writers do this by choosing the most specific words at their
disposal.
○ CHOOSING SPECIFIC WORDS OVER VAGUE ONES. Use specific words.
Make it a habit to scrutinize your nouns and verbs to always ask yourself whether
you're missing an opportunity to create a more vivid experience for your Reader.
This habit will open up a world of choices.
○ Not every sentence needs to be packed with details and descriptors. But learning
to pinpoint and root out vague words will give you more choices and therefore
more power to construct the best sentence for your piece and for your Reader.
○ It is, perhaps, the most famous bit of sentence-writing advice of all time: avoid
adverbs. When people say that adverbs hurt writing, they're talking about a
specific kind of adverb, called a manner adverb—even though they may not
realize it. Manner adverbs are the ones that describe the manner in which an
action occurred: walk quickly, eat slowly, dance enthusiastically. avoid (manner)
adverbs. Adverbs can weaken the very ideas they're trying to beef up. ike all
words, manner adverbs should be carefully chosen. They should carry some
benefit that overrides the less-is-more principle. They should not create
redundancies, and they should be free of that weak "look at me" quality to which
they're so prone. They should not appear to be telling the stuff that your nouns
and verbs should be showing. Only when you've asked yourself whether your
sentence is better off without a manner adverb can you decide whether that
adverb deserves to stay.
○ The relative pronouns, according to The Oxford English Grammar, are which,
that, and who or whom. Start seeing relative clauses as something akin to
adjectives and start taking note of which word each relative clause points to, and
you'll have a lot more power over how you use them. And remember, relative
clauses are great tools for squeezing extra information into a sentence, but only if
that information fits. Most of us use relative clauses effectively every day without
thinking about them. But full mastery of the art of sentence writing requires you to
stop and take notice of the stunning power of restrictive and nonrestrictive
clauses. You don't need to memorize every possible job these words can do. Just
begin to notice their function in a sentence and how relative clauses function in
well-written sentences. If you're looking to distill all this stuff about relative
clauses into a practical guideline to help your writing, consider this: Relative
clauses seem to work best when they cast a little extra light on a thing or an idea.
But they can quickly become a problem when they're used to insert history or
backstory. Consider, too, that whenever you have more than one relative clause
in a sentence, you might want to break the sentence up. Then again, like
Caiman, you might not. Just know that you have the choice.
○ Prepositional phrases, like relative clauses, are modifiers. See, here's the thing
about modifiers: people usually expect them to modify the closest possible word,
not one that's farther away in the sentence. Here, the important thing is to
remember that prepositional phrases work a lot like adjectives and adverbs and
your Reader has some pretty strong ideas about where they should go. Either
way, a participial phrase or clause can be seen as a modifier. As we saw in our
chapter on prepositional phrases, Readers usually expect a modifier to refer to
the closest noun. That's it. That's as hard it gets.
○ Get past the fear of the grammar jargon and you see that dangling participles are
very simple.Participles aren't the only things that can dangle. The best way to
avoid danglers is to stay vigilant. After a while it becomes a working part of the
brain. Considering how much this can help your sentences, it's worth the effort.
○ Caveats about passives have been overstated and distorted. Yes, passives can
be awful. Yes, they're a serious problem for some novice writers. Yes, you need
to be on the lookout for them. But this doesn't mean passives are always bad.
They're quite useful when used wisely—indispensable, even. So here's how you
should look at them. It will probably sound familiar: passive voice is a powerful
tool in the hands of a skilled writer, but it's brain-numbing poison in the hands of
an unskilled writer. So you should understand the concept and use the passive
only by choice. Learn to recognize passive sentences so you can consider
whether they would be better in the active voice. Bringing a passive sentence to
life is that easy.
○ I can't tell you which tense to choose for your writing. No one can. But there's
much to be learned by professional writers' choices. Simple past tense is the
standard form. It's a safe choice. You can deviate from it, but unless you have a
good reason to, maybe you shouldn't. This is why past-tense stories are told
primarily in the simple past tense and why present-tense stories stick mainly to
the simple present tense: because every alternative flies in the face of the
Reader's expectations. Readers expect the simple-tense stuff to be the main
story. The stuff in more complicated tenses is presumed to relate other events to
that main story's timeline.
○ This is what people mean by a bad tense shift. It's clearly a mistake. The writer
lost track of the time period she was writing about. It's a common problem, but it's
pretty easy to avoid. Just remember the when of your story and remember to be
consistent and logical.
○ All the verb tenses and even the passive voice are tools you can use anytime
that they work. But simple past tense and active voice are safe choices that can
save you anytime you get into trouble.
○ Notice how, in that last example, the nominalized form might be preferable. That
goes to show you that a nominalization can be an excellent choice. But it can
also be a terrible choice. So keep an eye out for nominalizations. Think of each
as an opportunity— a chance to consider alternative, possibly better ways to
structure your sentence.
○ Sometimes you'll find that recasting them in simple subject-plus-verb form can
make a better experience for the Reader. Sometimes you'll want to leave them as
they are. But don't write off all nominalizations as bad. Without them, this whole
chapter couldn't have existed, because nominalization is itself a nominalization.
○ Simple. It's the flip side of the same coin. If the suggests familiarity, then putting
the in front of something so surely unfamiliar suggests that familiarity will come. It
foreshadows. It teases. The Reader knows that the writer is going to explain who
the old man is. The writer is asking for the Reader's trust and promising
something in return. It's a great device that skillful writers use all the time. It
demonstrates the power of the. And it illustrates the importance of staying
attuned to your Reader.
○ This problem is called an unclear antecedent. Don't let the term unclear
antecedent intimidate you. It means exactly what it sounds like: that it's unclear
which prior thing is being referred to. Whenever you use a pronoun or leave a
noun merely implied, just be sure it's clear what you're talking about. If there's
any doubt, say outright whatever you had wanted to imply. You get the idea. Pick
any wording you choose.
○ But when you can find no synonyms or other embellishments to point squarely at
your antecedent, repetitiveness is better than chaos. It's better to repeat the word
bandit than to refuse to tell your Reader which one of your pivotal characters met
his demise.
○ Parallel form relies on Reader expectations. Parallels can be lists of words,
phrases, or whole clauses. Each element should be in the same form and should
attach in the same way to any shared phrase or clause. Every parallel poses its
own unique dangers. There's no simple formula for getting it right every time. All
you can do is proceed with caution and remember the Reader.
○ Semicolons have two main jobs. First, they help manage unwieldy lists. Second,
they separate two closely related clauses that could stand on their own as
sentences. This semicolon, used to separate two independent clauses, is
perfectly legitimate. But independent clauses, by definition, can stand alone. You
can form your own opinions about parentheses and semicolons. Just remember
who they're for.
○ If you like to get creative with quotation attributions, do. But do so because it
works, not because you want to show off or be different. When in doubt,
remember that said is an old friend you can always fall back on.
○ There's a difference between fatty sentences and long sentences. Yes, they're
often one and the same. Keeping the blubber out of your sentences is no easy
feat. Fatty prose sneaks into writing in many ways. It can take the form of an
unnecessary adverb, a ridiculous redundancy, a self-conscious over-explaining, a
cliche, or jargon.
○ You should develop the habit of always considering whether your sentence would
be better if you chopped out or swapped out a word, phrase, or clause. Develop
the habit of considering whether each sentence is itself an asset or a liability.
Adjectives can contribute to fatty prose. Considering how indispensable they are,
that's surprising. Yet, often, they're dead weight.
○ But adjectives are no substitute for solid information. Often they have that
less-is-more thing working against them. If it helps, divide adjectives into two
categories: facts and value judgments. Adjectives that express fact can be fine.
But adjectives that impose value judgments on your Reader are trouble.
○ Worse, sometimes adjectives are meaningless. All these words have their place.
They appear in the best writing, but more often they're found in the worst writing.
So consider them red flags and weigh their use carefully.
○ Adverbs and adjectives aren't the only flabby accessories that show up in writing.
Fatty prose can also happen because a writer is reluctant to make a bold
statement. Don't underestimate the Reader.
○ In other words, fatty insertions that can seem so meaningful when we're writing
are often unnecessary at best and insufferable at worst. When in doubt, take
them out.
○ Keep an eye out for these redundancies. Your ability to catch them will improve
with practice. To fix flabby writing, watch out for words or little clusters of words
that work well in speech but that don't translate well to the written word. Consider
first whether you can cut them out altogether. Also, watch out for sentences too
cowardly to come out and say something or whose wording is just too
convoluted.
○ Remember that your goal is not fewer words, but an economy of words.
Whenever you're faced with a problem sentence, start by looking for its main
clause—that is, its main subject and verb.
○ Of course, none of this is law. Skilled writers can defy all these principles
effectively and with grace. But novice writers need to understand the concepts
here.
○ Flabby prose, repetitiveness, and statements beleaguering the obvious separate
the amateurs from the pros. Make it a habit to seek out such lard in your own
writing and start to look for ways in which chopping up or chopping out problem
sentences can improve a whole work.
○ If Readers have prejudices, that's the writing world we live in. We must decide
how to navigate it.
○ We can't please all the Readers all the time and we shouldn't try. But we don't get
to create our Readers in our own image, either. We don't get to tell them what to
value or enjoy.
○ We can write in a way true to our own voice and our own ideas of beauty and
substance, and we can hope that some Readers appreciate it. But, even when
we aim to serve the narrowest cross section of Readers, we're still working for
the Readers we have. We should be grateful that we have them.
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