I’m loving it. The feeling reminds of the time I had tried to cut fats from my diet for about a month and then fell off the wagon for a slice of Lucky 13 pesto pizza just dripping with olive oil. What a blessed relief! Fat! Rapture!

I won’t give up my quest to perfect the art of writing lean when I’m writing copy, of course. A big book serves a completely different function than say, a web page or an elevator pitch. I open up The Ominvore’s Dilemma when I’m ready to curl up in a comfy chair for long stretches. Nobody ever curls up with a good trifold brochure.

So, while eye-grabbing headlines and bullet lists of benefits have their place in the world of word mongering, it’s heartening to find Pollan and to be reassured that beautiful, intricate, thought-inducing prose still resonates with people and still sells lots of books.

Good writing feeds the soul, and I’m glad to be reminded of the importance of enjoying a varied diet. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read about the mysteries of mycorrhizal fungi and marvel at the wild mushroom’s talent for decomposing and recycling organic matter into digestive enzymes that support all life on earth.

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All writers struggle with this one. For example, take a sentence like “Every writer has ______ own unique style.”

Should one use “his” exclusively? Pretty sexist.

Alternate by using “his” this time and “her” the next? Hard to keep track of, as well as being confusing for readers.

Resort to the clunkiness of “his/her” or “his or her?” Interrupts the flow of the sentences and breaks the reader’s concentration on the subject.

I wrote a report on the subject for a linguistics class a few years ago and decided that my own stylistic convention would be to use “their,” even though it’s not technically correct. I find it less jarring than the other options. To me, this solution is preferable to implying that every reader is male or self-consciously calling attention to the controversy every time.

With my clients, I discuss the pros and cons of the various choices and advise them to choose a convention and stick with it, then I add it to the style guide I keep for each client. As with so many other grammar and usage questions, there are choices and the important thing is to have a good reason for the decision you make and to be consistent.

So, what’s your preference? I’d love to hear other writers’ and readers’ perspectives and opinions.

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My typical process is to start every project by writing longhand on graph paper with my current favorite pen, getting down everything I can think of or find that relates to the subject. I’m a big believer in the spew-now-edit-later approach, and usually end up with many pages’ worth of raw material.

The next step is to winnow it down, sift out everything but the good stuff, and transcribe that to a fresh Word doc. Then comes hammering that into the actual first draft, which then goes through several more iterations before it becomes the so-called first draft the client sees.

But on this particular morning, I was all out of graph paper and loose-leaf paper. I didn’t even have any used-on-one-side printer paper. The only thing around to write on was a small stack of used envelopes (I recycle these for to-do lists and random notes to myself before ultimately putting them in the recycle bin). So I decided to see whether I could capture the gist of what I needed to know and explain using only the front and back sides of one used #10 envelope.

It worked beautifully and helped me keep a straightforward task from getting more complicated than it needed to be. I filled up my “canvas,” transcribed the notes to a Word doc, and realized I had a serviceable draft right there, already.

With some projects, you need to write a lot in order to discover what it is you’re really trying to say. With others, it works best to spend more upfront time cogitating and nailing down your points before you start to write. Writing takes time and focus and lots of practice either way, which is why people hire me to do it for them. The hard part is the blank screen or the blank page, getting that first draft out. Then comes the easier, fun part: tweaking and polishing and fine-tuning.

Discovering the envelope trick turned the hard part into a game, the object of which was to stay within the lines and make a linear journey from point A to point B, leaving out the hand-wringing stage entirely. I love it when that happens.

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At the meeting, we were discussing business writing and the importance of putting yourself in the reader’s position to check for things that could be misunderstood. One of the analysts told the story of a client of hers who is a short-term disability expert. The client habitually refers to her field as “STD” and recently sent out a customer sales letter touting the benefits of STD, talking about how everyone needs STD, etc.

In this client’s mind, STD means short-term disability coverage. But to the rest of the world, the first thing that comes to mind when we see STD is “s**ually transmitted diseases.”The moral of the story? Get a second opinion about what you’ve written before sending out any important piece of communication.

It is especially helpful if your reviewer/proofreader/editor is NOT in your field or your profession, because they’ll be more likely to catch any terms or concepts that only insiders are familiar with.

It’s very difficult to imagine how it feels not to know the things one knows well. That’s why so many how-to books do such a poor job of explaining how to do something. Being able to work from a beginner’s mind, even though you are an expert, is the secret to being a good communicator, a good teacher, even a good business analyst. One of the best ways to find out whether you’re succeeding is to get feedback, whether from your target audience, a friend, or a professional communicator.

The other example the group gave me was a joke (with special thanks to Jane Francis!):

A truck driver has penguins in his truck and is on his way to deliver them to the zoo. His truck breaks down. He flags down another trucker and says,“I’ll pay you $500 to take these penguins to the zoo.”“OK, I’ll be happy to do that,” says the second trucker.

Hours later, the first trucker is in town and sees the second trucker in a crosswalk with the penguins following behind him. “Hey, I thought I told you to take the penguins to the zoo.”

“Right,” trucker two replies. “We went to the zoo and had money left over so now we’re going to the movies.”

As George Bernard Shaw once said: “The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.”

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Many thanks to the alert subscriber who pointed out that the link in my earlier post wasn’t working! I fixed it there, too.

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I learned about it from the Idaho Foodbank’s latest newsletter and couldn’t resist logging on and spending way too much time there immediately. In the process of contributing thousands of grains of rice, I also learned that a “sastruga” is a wind-formed snow ridge and that “luculent” is another word for clear. That’s my idea of a good day.

The vocabulary is challenging, even for a person who brags that she has to buy a massive dictionary to find one that contains words she doesn’t know. The site lets you customize the level of difficulty and track your progress, and you can hear how a word should be pronounced by clicking the speaker icon next to it.

Not only does FreeRice give slackers everywhere a way to feed their brains while feeding the hungry, it also exemplifies elegant simplicity in website design. Everything works: the navigation is logical, the design clean and appropriate to the subject, and the content is informative, interesting, and well-written. For an example of what I mean, take a look at the about page. Does clean, clear copy get any better than that?

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I’ve given this talk numerous times, and I typically customize it to have either a marketing, or technical, or formal slant depending on the audience. But the core material is always built around what I consider the three commandments of communication: Know your audience, know your purpose, and keep it simple. I didn’t invent this message, obviously they’re widely available from many knowledgeable sources, but I certainly delight in passing it on, partly as a way of paying back all the wise souls who enlightened me.

It’s amazing how easy it is to make things much harder than they actually are, especially in the middle of a project with the deadline looming and the pressure turned up, but coming back to those three key concepts can put everything back into perspective. Audience, purpose, and K.I.S.S. Can’t you feel your blood pressure easing down just reading that? Doesn’t it make you want to explore the ins and outs of better business writing at the very first opportunity? I know I’m excited about it, in fact I could go on and on at some length — but I promise to keep the presentation under 90 minutes.

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Whether you call it a tagline, a magnetic introduction, a sixty-second commercial, an elevator pitch, or something else — we all need one. I’ve recently had a great time helping a few clients develop new pitches that are working well for them. In the process, I began to realize how important it is to practice and test whichever words you use. Even if you hire a brilliant writer to write a captivating script for you, you’re still the one who’ll have to believe in it and deliver it. It’s like learning to snowplow when you’re skiing downhill: until you try it and have the experience of it actually working, you’re scared to death of crashing or careening out of control.

I’ve also discovered how much fun it is to get two or more clients together to try out their new pitches. The client is usually self-conscious and reluctant to have faith in the new phrase, and they can’t totally trust my opinion because I wrote it. But having other people around to provide an immediate non-verbal reaction really does the trick.

In fact, maybe I should take my own medicine for a change and get a few peers together to help me work on a pitch for myself? I’ll have to get around to that one of these days.

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• Make time.
• Have fun.
• Follow up.

How can you not love that? As a writer, of course I also love it that she also used parallel construction and made each step a declarative, two-word sentence. Very nicely done—in only six words, she made a point more effectively than some books I’ve read on the subject.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the rush of ideas. Diving deep into the details of planning, messaging, branding, strategy, and so on is important, of course. But so is coming up for air. Marketing is about connecting with people, and ideas that don’t surface don’t reach anybody.

Like many of my clients and most of my colleagues, I can get easily carried away and need to remember not to make things harder than they are. It’s that old K.I.S.S. thing. Pam’s message is a welcome reminder that the most important step in marketing is to keep doing it.

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According to Webster’s, to “obfuscate” is “to make dark or unclear” in order to “muddle, confuse, or bewilder.” At a public hearing last week about the proposed Idaho Roadless Rule, I heard quite a bit of obfuscation in action.

The issue being discussed was whether to open up currently protected backcountry roadless areas in Idaho to road construction for logging and mining. The Idaho Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service representatives wouldn’t come right out and admit that, though.

Instead, those who attended the hearing were assured that “temporary roads” were only to be permitted in rare instances of “mineral activity” and “stewardship projects” for forest health.

Right. Many critical thinkers in attendance pointed out that there is no such thing as a temporary road. Wagon ruts on the Oregon Trail are still visible more than 100 years after the last wagon made the trek. Clearly, roads built with bulldozers and modern grading equipment to accommodate multi-ton trucks will not just disappear.

And what exactly are forest health “stewardship projects?” It wasn’t made clear what “stewardship” means. But my guess is that it will have more to do with cutting down trees than feeding them compost tea.

My favorite fuzzy term of all, though, was “mineral activity.” Minerals are rocks, and it’s been my experience that they are not especially active, nor does phosphate get restless and spring out of the ground on its own. What’s with the smokescreen? Do the governor’s team and the Forest Service honestly expect the public to believe that “mineral activity” is not really phosphate mining?

By underestimating their audience’s intelligence, obfuscators lose that audience’s trust along with their own credibility.

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