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.

When Business Development = Self-Development

When I became an entrepreneur, I had no idea what it would take. I didn’t realize it would be all that different from salary, except that I would find my own clients, make my own schedule, earn a varying income without benefits, and do most of my work at home with a cat in my lap.

At the moment, the cat is adorable, gray and white Sparrow, radiating happiness even while napping… but the real differences between salary and freelance are much more profound. I’ve discovered that entrepreneurship requires far greater depth and utilization of self-knowledge. My own psychology has become my primary piece of office equipment; to succeed, I must understand and use it to its best advantage. Adapting to the structure of a salaried job never required this. The process is deeply challenging, exhilaratingly creative, and profoundly rewarding. I must unabashedly own up to all of my strengths, weaknesses, and foibles, and use them in creative tinkering to figure out what really makes me tick or jam up and how to graft a business onto my own natural patterns. Thus, business development = self-development.

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.

Persuasive Verses:
How Outreach & Marketing Copy Are Like Poetry

This title might seem just about as strange to you as “How Polar Bears are Like Toucans,” since we tend to see poetry and marketing/outreach writing as utterly different creatures living in different environments. Indeed, I never expected that studying poetry back in college would be the slightest bit useful commercially; I enrolled in poetry classes simply for the pleasure of playing with the written word. Yet, years later when I started professionally writing outreach and sales materials for nonprofits and mission-based businesses, I immediately found myself applying many of the lessons I learned in my college studies of poetry.

The 8 crucial lessons poetry teaches to outreach and copy writers: