Have a message, but don't know quite how to get it across? Communication is KEY to any successful business and to any compelling story. From websites to business letters, from blogs to brochures, from vignette to best selling novel-- you focus on your business and your story and let me focus on sharing it with the world clearly, concisely, and with purpose.
People love a good story. That’s what so many books are, whether they’re on electronic devices or not. That’s what movies are. That’s how good speeches start—whether it’s from a politician or from your preacher at church.
And it's not just personal tales--your business has a story too, whether it's your mission statement or your goals or something you haven't quite put together just yet.
AND PEOPLE LOVE STORIES.
It has been my experience, though, that people have these stories but feel they can’t preserve them in writing because they say they can’t write.
I disagree.
Writing is not a solitary activity. The imagination of a fictional story or the memory of a real life happening rarely come from a solitary place, but rather are informed, at least in part, by experience. Human experience. Human interaction. Human happenings.
Getting that story onto paper is not a solitary activity. Sharing it with family, friends, or prospective clients can be a huge task, and often is when done well, but it doesn’t have to be prohibitively huge.
I can help with that.
Photography by Leslie Thomas. All rights reserved.
Proofreading
We all need a second set of eyes on our written work from time to time, someone to double check our spelling, make sure we’ve got our tenses in order, didn’t start writing down our dreams in the middle of finishing a late night proposal.
Proofreading can save you embarrassing errors.
But don’t we have things like spell check and that little paperclip guy in Microsoft Word to help us out with that? Well, sure. But he’s just a paperclip. He may know how to SPELL context, but he might not know what you mean IN context.
SAVE YOURSELF EMBARRASSING ERRORS.
Editing
We’re all busy. We’re checking our emails at stop lights while sitting next to a sign that says, “No texting and driving.” We’re in our cars zipping by digital billboards that change messages every less than a minute or so. We’ve got more commercials in our television programs now, but they’re shorter and packed with more images and words than ever before and if they don’t get us RIGHT AWAY, they don’t get us at all.
An editor’s responsibility is to clean up a writer’s work. All writers need an editor. Someone to take a look at the overall message of a piece—is it coherent? Is there a theme? Is it succinct? Do the words fit the topic? Is it in a logical order to make a reasonable point? Among many other aspects.
HOW YOU SAY WHAT YOU SAY IS IMPORTANT.
Writing
People have stories. Sit down with someone for a while and listen to what they’re really saying. Get past the this is where I’m from and here is what I do part and really listen to what folks are talking about. Their stories.
We live in a culture where the written word is changing so quickly, where books are being replaced by Kindles, Nooks, iPads, where phrases are being abbreviated into acronyms you have to have a dictionary to figure out (LOL), and hashtags. You’ve got 140 characters to tweet your message to the world—140 CHARACTERS. Not words, and not figures in a story—characters includes spaces, punctuation marks, and letters—in misspelled words too.
MAKE IT COUNT.