Your emails. Your marketing copy. Your in-app copy. Your whitepapers. If you aren’t reading them out loud before publishing, they probably suck.No doubt a lot of copy goes out without adequate review. Not long ago I read someone's product proposal, produced in order to drum up venture capital for a startup, and was shocked by how shoddy the composition was. That's the equivalent of sending out your resume with typos: you have no business doing that. Come to think of it, you'll have no business, doing that.
And that’s killing your business.
Nevertheless, I can't endorse the "read it out loud" advice wholeheartedly because I have firsthand experience of how easy it is to misconstrue your own writing. No, really, it's absurdly easy.
I wrote and rewrote a speech I was to deliver at a friend's wedding. It went from many scribbled, scratched-out pages to a typed draft on the computer, and still, the day before the wedding, I happened to notice an extra word in one sentence.
You might dismiss such a thing as trivial, but understand that I had been rehearsing this speech for several days and not once had vocalized the extra word. Moreover, on review of the original handwritten drafts afterwards, the extra word had been present all the way back at the start. Whatever caused my blindness to the extra word blinded me repeatedly. The brain is powerful that way.
Your mind, too, will trick you into thinking you have written exactly what you meant. If you try to read your own work out loud, chances are that your mind will continue to leap over problematic phrases, insert invisible pauses where the writing mandates none, and otherwise will compensate for the writing's deficiencies. Whatever blind spots you have for your own writing are rooted in cognition, and they will persist no matter how you try to express the same words.
You need an extra pair of eyes attached to a different brain to spot the deficiencies in your cherished bit of writing.
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