Toronto Content Marketing Blog

Writer's Workshop - Writing can be a female dog

12/15/2013

I'm going to date myself horribly here but the first cultural reference that comes to mind is the old Young MC song, Bust a Move. The troubling line? "Play hard to get, females get jealous."

Female what, exactly? Oh, he meant WOMEN. Both words have the same number of syllables, so there goes that argument!

The next time you're planning to use male or female in a written piece, make sure the answer to male WHAT or female WHAT is already answered. Or better still, if it's something like "female teacher" or "male nurse" consider if mentioning the sex of the subject is even relevant at all.

Check back next Sunday for another tip to tighten up your writing.

Everyday Writing Workshop - Don't do THAT!

12/8/2013

Welcome back to the writing workshop, a weekly series of tips to help everyday writers sharpen their messaging. Today let's talk about the extraneous THAT placements just waiting to take over the world.

It was a commonly held belief that Dickens' novels were so long because he was paid by the word. It would seem that is not the truth. So apparently Dickens' issue was the need for a better editor? Anyway, nobody is getting paid by the word in today's world of notoriously short attention spans, so make sure you ruthlessly cut any extra words from your writing.

The word "that" is a good starting point.

Any time you have finished writing a piece, do a quick scan for the word "that" and read the sentence back to yourself without it. For example, if you remove that from "I think THAT Sean Connery is the best Bond of all time," you still have "I think Sean Connery is the best Bond of all time."

See? Removing the extra word didn't change the meaning of the sentence at all! So stop doing THAT and check back next Sunday for another tip to tighten up your writing.

Everyday Writing Workshop - Just Use It!

12/1/2013

Welcome to the writing workshop, a weekly series of tips to help everyday writers sharpen their messaging. For our first feature, we're going to take aim at a personal pet peeve: Just use it!

There is a common societal misconception that the more syllables the word has, the more articulate it seems. This leads to the rampant misuse of words like UTILIZE in blog posts and publications everywhere. I'm looking at YOU, technical manuals! Utilize is not a fancier version of use, it has its own very specific meaning.

You are UTILIZING something when it is being used for something other than its intended purpose. When you USE a large kitchen knife to dice vegetables, you're using it. When you UTILIZE the back of that same knife to whack a jar to loosen the lid, you're utilizing it.

Now go forth and USE the word UTILIZE correctly!

Check back next Sunday for another tip to tighten up your writing.

Writer's Workshop - Writing can be a female dog

Everyday Writing Workshop - Don't do THAT!

Everyday Writing Workshop - Just Use It!

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