Liz Strauss.com

Today Michael Stelzner announced the Top Ten Blogs for Writers.

I’m pleased and honored to say he included this blog and comment at position 4.

Liz Strauss’s Successful-Blog: This blog has some amazing insights into the craft of writing.

But, I must say Mr. Stelzner list is incomplete in that it could not include his own blog.

Keep this in mind when you check out the entire list.

Michael A. Stelzner’s Writing White Papers Blog THE blog by the man who wrote THE white paper on white papers and then wrote Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged. There’s a reason his newsletter has 20,000 subscribers.

Always deal with the best.

Thank you, Michael.

Liz Strauss

In this world of technology, we need to read and write. Police officers write reports, Chefs and restaurant owners write reviews, business letters, and now are blogging too. Managers often ask teams to write the status of what they are working on. Performance appraisals often ask employees to write a self-evaluation, complete with performance goals. Every business person I have worked with since the last century has communicated via email.

It’s my experience that most folks don’t have training or confidence in how to put what needs to be said into writing. This not only causes miscommunication, it also reflects on job performance, projecting a lower image of competency than is reality. The gap in training and confidence also steals time and causes stress as people work and worry over how to express their ideas and issues in writing.

Even teachers have this problem.

Though enthusiasm and job commitment help to overcome hurdles in other situations, at the juncture of writing without confidence, experience, or complete training, enthusiasm, and commitment can often cause additional stress and be debilitating. Writers begin to self-edit before they have even started writing, and they get what folks call writer’s block. What they really have is a major case of stress cause by a fear of failing. It’s dangerous to miscommunicate in writing.

How to Lower Stress When Writing

I offer this checklist to help writers refocus, to bring their thinking back to the writing, it’s purpose, and the audience it will be serving.

1. Make the work area visually clean.
2. Think about the person that is the audience. If the audience is a group, imagine a prototypical individual from that group to write for. Let’s call that person your reader.
3. Consider your reader’s traits and characteristics — know that your reader is intelligent, but doesn’t have the information you are about to share.
4. Decide what you want your reader to remember. Write that out in words your reader might actually use to say it.
5. Prepare notes — bullet points — to organize your thoughts around what you want your reader to remember. Most informal communication should convey less than three bullet points. One idea or bullet point is perfectly fine in an email.
6. Use the right tool to communicate. Know the heirarchies of business communication. Understand which is most appropriate and effective for the information you have to share.
   Instant Message > Email > Business Letter > Formal Proposal
   Instant Message > VoIP/Telephone > Meeting
7. Write up your message, using your notes and a clear mental image of your reader and the venue as you write.

Follow this checklist and you’ll find that stress will fall away. Writer’s block won’t be a worry, because you’ll know what you want to say, who you want to say it to, and how you want to say it. You’ll know the type of communication and the venue. You’ll be able to imagine your audience and get to what they need to hear from you to understand your message.

Almost always writer’s block is caused by the fact that we don’t know what we want to say or who we’re talking to.

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding manager. –Perfect Virtual Manager

Liz Strauss

A brand new blog means a brand new audience. You may hope that you will draw your customers as your readers, but who knows who will come to read your prose? You may draw a new potential customer, someone who has just discovered you and your organization, someone who could be an influencer, a customer evangelist, taking what you to say to many more potential customers leading your enterprise to exponential growth.

Just the idea of not knowing who is reading can be an overwhelming state for some writers. How to decide on simple things such as writing voice and style can become looming questions. I suggest that as the blogger, you make a choice that your reader will be an intelligent person who doesn’t knowthe information, a single most important reader, who is very much like yourself.

To make the audience take form as a person, which will make the writing easier and stronger, ask yourself these questions;

• Who am I writing for?
• How is this reader like me and how is this reader not?
• Why does this reader read blogs like mine?

One helpful thing to do is to sketch a written profile of the person who might be the average reader, that single most important reader that you will be writing for. Then with that reader in mind, you can write with confidence and care, in a conversational tone of voice, choosing words and phrasing that is appropriate for that reader to understand the content as well as to get a sense of who you, the blogger, really are.

Liz Strauss

I was just answering two comments on the post Pay Attention. No, I Mean Really. Doing that left me thinking of something blogging has taught me a lot about — not just the beauty of paying attention to one thing at a time — but the fulfillment of offering readers a chance to talk.

When I first started blogging, I often tried to do too much. I’d write a post that carried the load of too many thoughts at one time. Those blogging posts went both deep and wide. They were so complete, I left no room for readers to add their thoughts.

It’s not a conversation when all a reader can say is I agree with you, Great post. or You covered that subject really well. There’s just nowhere for a conversation to go, if I don’t leave room for a reader’s thoughts to squeeze in between my own. Now I know to think about the conversation when I write.

Here are a few things that I do differently now.

• I ask more questions without answering them.
• I don’t try to think through every possibility as I once used to do.
• I’ve backed off on holding myself accountable as an expert on the what I write about and instead, think of myself as one of the audience talking to another reader about an idea, waiting to hear his or her point of view.

Right now I’m wondering what you’re thinking about most blog posts. What is the thing that pulls you out? What changes you into a person who writes a comment, who wants to add to the discussion, who feels your thoughts are important, will be valued, and will be heard?

Those are questions I think about when I blog . . . only readers can answer them.

Liz Strauss