5 FIGHT THE FLAB
In this chapter you will learn how to take your writing to the gym and make it leaner and punchier.
One magazine editor I spoke to shared a top tip: when you’ve written something, go back and delete the first paragraph. Nine times out of ten, the piece works better without it (yes, I deleted the first paragraph of this chapter).
That’s a good example of business writing’s biggest enemy: flab. Flab is the stuff your piece doesn’t need, and it often slips in as the result of habits picked up over the years.
One way to fight the flab in business writing is to take the same approach professional writers do when they write press releases. Press releases – good ones, anyway – are written like a pyramid, with the punchiest bit at ...
Get Business Writing for Technical People now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
