Articles about writing, editing and improving content

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 …

“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 …

If you need to say something in just a few words – which is what happens when you coin a company name, slogan or domain name – it’s a mistake to try and cram as much literal meaning as possible into the message.

According to Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little by Christopher Johnson, “a message isn’t a treasure chest full of meaning. It’s more like a key that opens doors.” …

You’ll never read poetry, watch Shakespeare or listen to a Katy Perry song in quite the same way again after reading Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence.

This irreverent and engaging book explains the ancient figures of rhetoric, ranging from the better known ones such as alliteration right through to obscure sounding techniques such as anadiplosis and hendiadys …