“Lights, camera, action verbs!”

Oh, wait — you don’t know that saying?

Let me tell you, it’s taking off in writing coaching circles. Well, at least in this writing coach’s circle.

Some of the best advice I’ve received as a writer is to focus on my verbs…

Ah, the glory of a (crisp) fall day: yellow leaves (crunching underfoot), apples hanging (low) on the tree, and a clear blue sky (with the occasional line of geese heading north).
Parentheses (also called round brackets informally) are like someone yelling “wait!” in the middle of your beautifully-crafted writing. (See what I mean?)…

The ongoing standoff between …
The ongoing debate over ....
The ongoing discussion about …

See anything in common in those three sentence fragments?

What did you say? Your thought process is ongoing ...

The racks of swimsuits are out and the magazines have all got together and decided we should go on a beach-body diet. What if we shook our heads and put our words on a diet instead?

Once there was a dog.
In the second sentence, it was a canine.
By the third sentence, it was a mutt.
After that, the poor writer couldn’t choose between hound or pooch.

Why couldn’t he just call it a dog again?

Hey!

How you feel about that greeting probably depends on your age — and who's writing to you…

We’re all people – not carbon copies of each other – so showing your personality is what makes life interesting. It’s also what helps people connect with you so that they trust your expertise and decide to hire you…

Big words can slow the reader down and make it harder to understand your message. Big words can also be vague – think of the word facilitate. What picture does it paint in your mind? I’m guessing you’re seeing a lot of blank space right now…

When you work in a radio newsroom, you get used to people talking to themselves. They’re reading radio scripts out loud. It’s not just practice: it’s a way of making sure the writing actually sounds like something they would say…