As a follow-up the Effective Business Writing post from yesterday, here are some more general concepts I took from the writing seminar.

The most important question of all to ask of your writing is, “Does It Work?” This is even more important than asking if your writing is accurate. Whether or not it is perfect and correct, if it serves its intended purpose is paramount to all else.

While we presumably all follow best practices that make for good writing, taking time to go through the writing process steps will help us all improve our writing. A few practices we should put in effect for the sort of writing we do:

• Consider the overall context of the project, including the audience, product, purpose, tone, voice, etc.
• Include the clustering process for larger projects.
• While it may not always be logical to perform every step in the process, be sure to at least make writing and editing separate passes/steps.
• Read writing out loud. This helps to ensure it is conversational.
• Put most important information first in a sentence. Example: “Log in to your account to update your preferences.” What the user wants to do in this situation is update his or her preferences, so a better option would be, “To update your preferences, log in to your account.”