100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Make yourself likable
Eleven ways to make people like what you write

In order to write successfully, you don’t have to become a great writer. But you do have to make yourself likable. If you are asking people to buy your product, take your advice, mail a check, or worry about the problem you present, you first want them to care about you. When you write well, you share a private moment with the readers. Present yourself to readers as someone they would welcome into their homes. Write clearly and conversationally, and strive always to present in your writing some honest picture of who you are.

Readers will like you if you edit from your work French phrases, obscure literary allusions, and archaic words that are known to only six persons in the world.

Readers will like you if you seem to understand who they are and what their world is like. If you write an article called “Getting Back on the Budget” for Woman’s Day, and you begin by advising the readers to go out and borrow $100,000, you will reveal your ignorance of the readers’ financial status. The readers won’t like you. (And of course the editors at Woman’s Day won’t like you and won’t publish your article.)

Readers will like you if you use humor in almost everything you write. Of course, there are times when humor is inappropriate (on a death certificate, for example), but don’t hesitate to bring humor into your business correspondence and articles.

Readers will like you if you show that you are human. In a how-to piece, for example, you might write, “This third step is a little hard to master. I ruined six good slides before I got it right. So be smarter than I was; practice on blanks.”