Archive: Effective Writing
Public Relations Tips: What Makes a Great News Story?
People sometimes ramble on aimlessly about this or that, leaving the audience wondering, where is she going with this? Keynote speakers, executives, trainers, and PR pros are encouraged to tell stories to engage the audience, but many seem unclear about what makes a...
Don’t Underestimate Rhythm, Variety, and Emphasis in Business Writing
Don’t underestimate the power of the clear, direct sentence, but creating rhythm, variety, and emphasis are other ways to make your writing compelling. Here is a segment from a USA Today story looking back on pay phones in America: For a century, the pay phone...
PR Writing Tip: Your Sentences May Be TOO Long
A person usually has good intentions when he or she suggests the right way or wrong way to do something in writing, but if you ask the person why that is the accepted way, you often hear, it just sounds better or that’s the way I was taught, or the more candid I...
Business Writing Tip: Focus on Paragraph Unity and Length
If you want to hold an audience’s attention, paragraph unity and length are important to readability. Many writers write until the text appears to be getting long, then put in a period and hit enter. But a paragraph is not a randomly created chunk of black...
The Only Five Ways to Organize Your Writing
You might be scratching your head as you try to arrange your topics before starting to write, but you only have five ways to organize information. Many business communications professionals don’t invest much time, if any, in organizing. They assume that as long...By Ken O’Quinn
Focus on Them
Perfect Phrases for Business Letters (McGraw-Hill)
TD at Work — Business Writing for Managers
As a contributing author in this book on leadership, Ken offers insights and tips for managing difficult conversations, providing effective feedback, and being authentic. Order here.
Perfect Phrases for Business Letters (McGraw-Hill)
Provides the right words and phrases for any situation - quickly. The book was reprinted in Japanese because of high-volume sales there.
TD at Work — Business Writing for Managers
The Association for Talent Development invited Ken to write this 22-page booklet for the TD at Work series.
Current Blog Post
Use a Dash for Emphasis, a Hyphen for Clarity
People often confuse dashes and hyphens. Dashes are used for three reasons, most commonly to mark off information that you …