Power Writing

Reading time: About 2 minutes I plan to spend most of my birthday reading, but if you’d like to help my blog, there’s one small thing you could do… This Saturday is my birthday. I’m not going to tell you the number — let’s just say I’ve earned every one […]

Reading time: About 3 minutes By temperament, I’m an “awfulizer” — someone who always imagines the worst possible outcome. If negative thoughts plague your writing, read on for some helpful advice… A few years ago, a client told me she’d written one sentence so clumsy she wanted to delete the

Reading time: About 3 minutes If you ever struggle with feeling scatterbrained (and who doesn’t?), here are some practical and easy tips for you. You sit down to write. You have the time, the coffee, the open document. But your brain just won’t cooperate. You read the same sentence four

Reading time: About 3 minutes There are lots of excuses but no good reasons. You need to learn how to write when you’re being interrupted… A reader wrote to me last week in despair. She works from home, has two kids and a dog and shares an office with her

Reading time: About 3 minutes Instead of throat-clearing in writing, just encourage yourself to get to the point more expeditiously…. Someone sent me an email last week. The first paragraph was warm and friendly and ran to six sentences. Not one of them said anything. The writer was trying to

Reading time: About 3 minutes Is your task urgent, important or something for a “to-don’t” list? Make sure you label all of these different items accordingly… Everyone talks about to-do lists. I want to talk about the other kind. I’ve worked with writers for more than 25 years, and one

Reading time: About 3 minutes Do you feel you’re getting worse at writing? No! It’s an optical illusion brought on by your increasing skills…. Last spring, a client of mine had been writing for about eight months. Every day, or close to it, she logged brief sessions, nothing heroic. She

Reading time: About 3 minutes Do you suffer from the illusion of explanatory depth? Also known as the confidence trap, this error confuses familiarity with understanding…. Ask someone how a zipper works. Not in a vague way. Ask them to explain it — the teeth, the slider, the mechanism that

Reading time: About 3 minutes Do you wince when you hear about the success of other writers? It’s likely you’re just suffering from availability bias… You’ve probably never heard of the availability bias. But it’s been running most of our writing lives for years. Here’s how it works: When we