Three Crucial Tips for Writing About
Your Participants

Even when your heart is in the right place, it is all too easy to write about the participants of your work in a way that subtly disempowers or dishonors them. Here are three important considerations to make sure you avoid this faux pas.

This Tiny Word Can Do Wonders
for Your Work

The way you describe your organization or business defines how people connect to it – or don’t. Your word choice matters, even down to what pronoun you use.

You may be thinking, “But we don’t have a choice; an organization is an abstract noun, so grammatically we have to use it.”

Not so.

An organization is also a group of people. As a member of the group, you can use the pronouns we, our, and us. Or if you are a solopreneur, you can use I and me.

A Quick Tip to Make Readers Feel Close
to Your Work

Small words can make a big difference.  There are many pairs of words that you might use interchangeably, but their differences could markedly change how well your readers connect with what you write.

The Most Common Mistake I See:
Can You Guess it? Are You Making It?

Whether I am drawing from previously written materials to write new content, or editing copy drafted by my clients, I see many people’s writing. In this Flight Log, I will discuss the most common mistake I see, both because it’s possible you are making it, and because your competitors probably are. Excelling in areas where your competitors are weak is a great way to stand out from the crowd and get the attention you want.

How to Write About What Went Wrong

You know you didn’t measure up. Your nonprofit didn’t meet its objectives, or you made a mistake on your customer’s order, or maybe someone even complained to your boss about you. No one’s perfect; it may have been an honest mistake, or there may have been unforeseen circumstances that transformed a simple task into something like trying to fly a kite on a windless day, or sitting on the ground in a perfect breeze, muttering and grumbling as you picked at the knotted mass of the kite’s tail. Whatever it was, something went wrong and you need to write to a stakeholder about it. What do you do?

4 Simple Steps
To Creating a Voice that Connects with Readers

In this world of anonymous crowds overflowing with written chatter until we can hardly pick out a single voice, let alone remember it, people respond to your writing only when they feel a connection with you. To earn their attention, your written voice must show real personality, so they feel another human voice speaking to them – one they want to hear. If you actually sit down and think about what you want your voice to convey and how to convey it, the process is simple and the benefit huge – people will listen.

How Your Writing Can
Build Community to Change the World

To truly change our cultural practices and values, we need to bring people together to share and live a new vision. We need to create community. This Flight Log will look at the need for community on three levels – societal, individual, and organizational – and how you can structure your messaging to address all three.

3 Ways to Inspire People with Your Writing

Writing is powerful. Even a single sentence or phrase can instantly uplift or deflate our spirits. To propel our mission-based work forward, we need to use this power strategically. There are times to connect people with the sadness, fear, or anger that are indispensable for truly understanding a problem and being spurred into action to solve it. Generally, though, the best way to make the most positive difference is to leave people feeling inspired by the time they finish reading your writing.

Two Little Words that Create Community

How you frame your work in speech and writing can make all the difference. If your messaging fosters a sense of community, people will want to be involved. Certain words can subtly and powerfully undermine the atmosphere of equality and mutual support on which real community is based, while other words just as quietly and compellingly boost community feeling, transforming how people feel and what they do. Replacing just two tiny, common words can dramatically shift both your messaging and your results, so that people feel eager and gratified to be part of your community and support you.

Don’t Just Avoid It:
How to Counteract Stereotype in Writing

People are sensitive, and that means not only that they are easily hurt, but that they perceive a great deal of subtlety and are often influenced by nuances of which they aren’t even consciously aware. In writing, outright bigotry is often easy to spot and avoid, but sometimes we subtly support stereotypes, stigmas, and dehumanization without even realizing it. Here are two techniques for increasing your awareness of how writing can either embolden stereotypes or replace them with humanitarian concepts.