Hello good readers. I’m continuing my writing education by reading books filled with writing tips and advice. Over the weekend I finished Everybody Writes: Your New and Improved Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content by Ann Handley. This book contains over 60 tips for writing better content, whether you’re creating social media posts or composing emails or writing content for a website. While I won’t list every single tip, I will mention the ones that stood out to me the most.

Tip #4 and tip #10 go hand in hand. Tip #4 is Regard Publishing as a Privilege. This is a reminder to put your audience first. This brings me to #10: Swap Places With Your Reader. Put your reader first. Create content you think will please your reader. I also like tip #15: If You Take A Running Start, Cover Your Tracks. In other words don’t take too long to get to the topic of your writing. I believe this is especially true for social media posts. You only have a few seconds to get a reader’s attention, so get to your point as soon as possible. Limit the amount of background information you include. This is why I tend to write shorter books. I just don’t see a need to go all the way around the block and over to the next city just to get across the street. Tip #33 tells writers to “ditch weakling verbs”. Using the word slash instead of cut, for example. I like verbs that pack more of a punch.

There are tips regarding grammar rules; which ones to follow and which ones to break. There’s a chapter on words that are often misused and confused with one another, which is always helpful. Handley also talks about writing content for specific sources, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. She also included a chart for ideal lengths for posts based on the type of post. For example, the recommended length for a blog post is 15oo words (this post has less than 400).

I thought this book was useful and there’s a ton of helpful information contained within it that I didn’t cover here. If you’re looking for a straight-forward book about how to improve your writing, this is one you may want to pick up.