Articles about writing, editing and improving content

My last post explained how to write in the active voice – but what’s far less known is the middle voice, not to mention the effective voice …

Writing in the active voice is key to making your copy sharper and easier to read. Yet while many people have heard about it, there’s a lot of confusion about what it means.

Some think it’s about tone or style, others think it’s about tense.

Instead, active voice is about having the subject perform the action of the verb – rather than being acted on by it …

An editor once told me you’re not a real journalist until you get your first lawsuit. That was 20 years ago and although he was (probably) joking, I perversely liked the sentiment. After all, great journalism is all about keeping the bastards honest – and it’s hard to do that without ruffling feathers. The fact that a defamation suit turns your life to hell was a detail that escaped me in my youth.

These days I’m older, possibly wiser, and certainly more wary. After all …

“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

Truman Capote famously dismissed Jack Kerouac’s writing by saying this, and I’m inclined to agree. As much as I love the wide-eyed wonder and glimpses of poetry that run through Kerouac’s work, large tracts of it are barely readable.

The same applies to a lot of what passes as content marketing …

Short sentences are easy to read.

They grab our attention, increase the reading pace, and make it more likely that we’ll move from one sentence to the next.

They’re also easier to understand.

Research by the American Press Institute (API), for example, found that …