Something You Should Know about Business Writing

September 11, 2012

Interview with Simon Garfield, author of the book Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

________________

Mike Carruthers:
Go to write something on your computer and you have a ton of different type styles to choose from. There are over 100 thousand of them in the world with more on the way. Don’t we have enough?

Simon Garfield:
You could say the same argument for love songs or landscape paintings. You think oh well there surely must be enough in the world but actually we are a creative race.
 

May 3, 2012

Interview with D.A. Benton, author of the book The Virtual Executive: How to Act Like a CEO Online and Offline

________________

Mike Carruthers:
So much communication today is electronic and not face-to-face so trying to personalize that communication can be very helpful. For example the subject line in an email.

D.A. Benton:
Putting someone else’s name in the subject line statistically improves the chance they will open it, personalizes it, humanizes it.
 

September 1, 2011

Interview with Sandra Lamb, author of the book How to Write It: Complete Guide to Everything You'll Ever Write

________________

Mike Carruthers:
Have you ever had to write something and had trouble saying what it is that you want to say? Well, here’s some help

Sandra Lamb:
Think through your message all the way from beginning to end and be able to state what you are going to write in 1 message sentence.
 

November 11, 2010

Interview with Diana Young, author of the book Be a Brilliant Business Writer: Write Well, Write Fast, and Whip the Competition

_______________

Mike Carruthers:
People actually make judgments about you based on your style of writing.

Diana Young:
Actually there was a guy at Princeton, Daniel Oppenheimer who studied this and found out that people judged writers to be less intelligent when they used complicated words, complex sentence structure and even hard to read fonts or design.