During 20 years of coaching business and professional writers, I've come to believe that most problems boil down to four errors that all writers, including this one, often make:
- faulty audience analysis
- faulty template analysis
- head writing
- closing off feedback
Prewriting Stage: Faulty Analysis of Audience and Template
Faulty audience analysis is often to blame for failures in the final product. The primary importance of audience analysis is why we just finished a week studying and practicing it. Audience analysis should always come first and be exhaustive. Audiences come with very specific expectations and needs. Unless you know both of those, how can you possibly expect to meet them?There is a radio station that plays constantly in the mind of every reader and every listener: WRIT-FM. Those are the call letters for "What's Really In It For Me?" That is the question. Really, the only question. Your first job as a writer or speaker is to figure out what is in it for your audience. Often that means focusing on the benefits for your audience, not the wonderful research you've done or features you've created. The features are meaningless unless they offer direct benefit to the audience. Don't tell me how wonderful your new gadget is. Tell me how it will save me time and make me rich. Focus on benefits, not features.
Faulty template analysis. For virtually everything you can think of to write, a template for it already exists: a set of common, defining characteristics shared by all other pieces of writing in that genre or category. Some examples of templates: a newspaper obituary, a thank-you note, a company's annual report, an employee evaluation, a Shakespearian love sonnet, a Harlequin romance novel. Producing a piece of writing that fully meets your audience's expectations requires that you know and employ a template's major features.
Does that sound dreadfully artificial to you? Whatever happened to individual creativity?
One of your first jobs as a business communicator is to envision and then employ the accepted template for the type of writing you are sitting down to produce.
Drafting/Composing Stage: Head Writing
The most common mistake in drafting/composing stage is, by far, head writing: the attempt to compose and edit a sentence in your head before writing it down.The problem with head writing is that it forces you to perform two mutually exclusive tasks at the same time: composing and then immediately editing what was just composed. And make no mistake about it; they are contradictory. When composing, we are finding the words, solving the riddle of the blank page.. We are using language to explore the soft underbelly of thought and feeling. Editing is everything you do after you've written a first draft.
When sitting in front of a computer to compose a draft, one of the worst things you can do is to let your hands be idle. In other words, to head write: your fingers posed, awaiting the thoughts to become polished sentences in your mind before conveying them to the screen.
That can hurt you.
During the process of creation, our mind and fingers should work as one to achieve the rough shape of our communication. Our goal should be to initiate a stream of thought and expression, to connect word and thought more simultaneously than can be done when attempting to head write..
"Speed writing" is my antidote to head writing. Speed writing is simply a way of inserting into the writing process a time when unedited creation can take place. How does speed writing work? Very simply:
When composing your first draft, after all your prewriting activities, set a specific time frame (10-15 minutes) and begin writing as fast as you can. You do not stop writing until: (1) the set period of time ends, or (2) you arrive at the end, whichever comes first.
Other rules include:
(3) You must not interrupt the flow of words upon the screen, even if it means typing things like "OK, I've run out of ideas for this section, now I will hit return twice and start a new section, let me think, what if I called it. . . "
Or: "I can't remember the quote/fact I want to use here so I'll just type in XXX . . ."
Your goal should be to get from the beginning of the segment to the end no matter what short cuts you take or how many XXX's you have to type in. Just get to the end.
(4) You must not stop to reread or edit what you've written until the speed session is over.
Some writers, including Stephen King, like to listen to loud rock music. Some, including Ernest Hemingway, write standing up. Some like the feel of a number two pencil, some love the sight of a yellow legal pad. Some drink coffee, some drink that miracle of modern marketing: bottled water.
Whatever. Write lying down, if you want. Just start writing and don't stop. Don't edit. Don't second guess. Don't evaluate. Don't do anything but listen to that little voice inside your head and write down everything it says.
Postwriting Stage: Failure to Get Feedback
The most common error in this stage is not soliciting feedback from others before finishing a piece. The longer we spend on a piece of writing, the more we lose our ability to be objective about it. In some cases, we've looked at the writing so much that we have the sentences memorized, which prevents us from seeing mechanical errors as we try to proof them. As we read, we listen to the memorized sentence in our head instead of actually seeing what's on the page.
Our choices are to leave the piece alone for a long time so that it
gets frosty and we regain our objectivity (rarely an option in a world
of deadlines) or to get others to provide us feedback. There are few
successful writers who do not rely on their favorite editors--be they
spouses, friends, colleagues or hired guns--to help them shape the
final product.
Why should you or I be any different?