Everybody Writes

Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

Ann Handley

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118905616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Finally a go-to guide to creating and publishing the kind of content that will make your business thrive.

Everybody Writes is a go-to guide to attracting and retaining customers through stellar online communication, because in our content-driven world, every one of us is, in fact, a writer.

If you have a web site, you are a publisher. If you are on social media, you are in marketing. And that means that we are all relying on our words to carry our marketing messages. We are all writers.

Yeah, but who cares about writing anymore? In a time-challenged world dominated by short and snappy, by click-bait headlines and Twitter streams and Instagram feeds and gifs and video and Snapchat and YOLO and LOL and #tbt... does the idea of focusing on writing seem pedantic and ordinary?

Actually, writing matters more now, not less. Our online words are our currency; they tell our customers who we are.

Our writing can make us look smart or it can make us look stupid. It can make us seem fun, or warm, or competent, or trustworthy. But it can also make us seem humdrum or discombobulated or flat-out boring.

That means you've got to choose words well, and write with economy and the style and honest empathy for your customers. And it means you put a new value on an often-overlooked skill in content marketing: How to write, and how to tell a true story really, really well. That's true whether you're writing a listicle or the words on a Slideshare deck or the words you're reading right here, right now...

And so being able to communicate well in writing isn't just nice; it's necessity. And it's also the oft-overlooked cornerstone of nearly all our content marketing.

In Everybody Writes, top marketing veteran Ann Handley gives expert guidance and insight into the process and strategy of content creation, production and publishing, with actionable how-to advice designed to get results.

These lessons and rules apply across all of your online assets — like web pages, home page, landing pages, blogs, email, marketing offers, and on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media. Ann deconstructs the strategy and delivers a practical approach to create ridiculously compelling and competent content. It's designed to be the go-to guide for anyone creating or publishing any kind of online content — whether you're a big brand or you're small and solo.

Sections include:

• How to write better. (Or, for "adult-onset writers": How to hate writing less.)
• Easy grammar and usage rules tailored for business in a fun, memorable way. (Enough to keep you looking sharp, but not too much to overwhelm you.)
• Giving your audience the gift of your true story, told well. Empathy and humanity and inspiration are key here, so the book covers that, too.
• Best practices for creating credible, trustworthy content steeped in some time-honored rules of solid journalism. Because publishing content and talking directly to your customers is, at its heart, a privilege.
• "Things Marketers Write": The fundamentals of 17 specific kinds of content that marketers are often tasked with crafting.
• Content Tools: The sharpest tools you need to get the job done.

Traditional marketing techniques are no longer enough. Everybody Writes is a field guide for the smartest businesses who know that great content is the key to thriving in this digital world.

Part I
Writing Rules: How to Write Better (and How to Hate Writing Less)

There is no one way to write—just as there is no one way to parent a child or roast a turkey. But there are terrible ways to do all three. And with each, you've got to have a basic understanding of the process before you begin. I'm going to assume you have that—you know enough, for example, to procure an oven and a pan before you begin to roast anything.

In other words, this book assumes that you are equipped with some very basic tools: a working knowledge of English (that means basic levels of grammar, spelling, usage, and punctuation). And I mean very basic: if you recognize that this is a sentence and not, say, a rhinoceros…we're good, and you can safely proceed knowing you aren't out of your depth. (In Part II, we'll talk about sharpening those tools in your content tool shed.)

It also assumes—or hopes is perhaps the better word—that you come with a bit of gung ho: an eagerness to become a better writer because you recognize that it matters, and because you've kicked to the curb the dumb notion that only an anointed few have the chops to be good writers.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at the Atlantic, spent a year teaching writing to MIT students. He later wrote, “I felt that the rigor of math had better prepared these kids for the rigor of writing. One of my students insisted that whereas in math you could practice and get better, in writing you either ‘had it’ or you didn't. I told her that writing was more like math then [sic] she suspected.”¹

In other words, good writing can be learned—the way trigonometry or algebra or balancing a balance sheet is a skill most of us can master. In an essay at the Neiman Journalism Lab, “How I Faced My Fears and Learned to Be Good at Math,” Matt Waite writes: “The difference between good at math and bad at math is hard work. It's trying. It's trying hard. It's trying harder than you've ever tried before. That's it.”²

The same is true about writing.

What you will read in this section is everything I know to be most important about writing: everything I have learned, collected, curated, and discovered over 25 years of writing and editing professionally (and a lifetime of writing for fun), distilled into the most important perspectives that I think can help all of us up our writing game.

This would be a good time to thank Neil Patel and Kathryn Aragon, coauthors of The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing (2013). Their guide helped me to conceptualize how I might present to you what I'd been doing—without putting much conscious thought into how I was doing it—for those 25 years. If you're looking for a handy reference for much more than writing, check it out in full at bit.ly/AdvancedGuide.

I hope that the rules in this section will help you to better organize and develop your writing—and to choose better words, craft better sentences, and consider things like cadence and flow, and many others that I'll stop specifying right now so you can just get to it…!

If you have never written—if you are an “adult-onset writer” who is perhaps recovering from some trauma that made you consider yourself an inept writer—this section provides some helpful processes and structures to help you get started.

If you've been writing for a while, here is some collected wisdom that may help you write better or more effectively.

And if you are an experienced writer, I hope you rediscover the glee and joy of honing a craft.

One final thing: I've organized this book as a series of so-called rules because I wanted to offer useful and (I hope) memorable how-tos. I also wanted to differentiate these ideas from the general motivational aphorisms that pass for most writing advice. Part I is a gaggle of helpful how-tos specific to the writing process and organization of a piece (it's less boring than it sounds), as well as advice for livelier writing. Part II will cover grammar and usage, framed for a marketing audience.

In any case, these “rules” are intended to be functional tools, not prescriptive rules. So, as we wrote (in a different context) in Content Rules, any rules here are less hard-and-fast writing rules than they are a handy set of guidelines. Think of them more as bumpers on a bowling lane that nudge the ball away from the gutter and greatly increase the odds that the ball you throw will land a strike.

Of course, you can break the rules (or ignore the tools) as you wish. Isn't every rule made to be broken? Doesn't every rule have an exception? You might be a kind of content MacGyver who wackily crafts beautiful content out of a metaphorical paper clip and roll of Scotch tape. That's totally great—in fact, I hope you do! But, first, you have to know what rules to break (or what tools to ignore).

Notes

1. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Notes from the First Year: Some Thoughts on Teaching at MIT,” Atlantic, June 11, 2013, www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/notes-from-the-first-year-some-thoughts-on-teaching-at-mit/276743. 2. Matt Waite, “Matt Waite: How I Faced My Fears and Learned to Be Good at Math,” Neiman Journalism Lab, November 13, 2013, www.niemanlab.org/2013/11/matt-waite-how-i-faced-my-fears-and-learned-to-be-good-at-math.

1
Everybody Writes

I want to tell you that the key to taking your writing muscles from puny to brawny is to write every day. That writing is a habit, not an art. It is the former—and I'll talk about that in a minute. But before I do, let's reframe this business of writing.

As you think of developing a writing habit, realize that you probably already do write every day. You write emails; you post to Facebook, Twitter,...