100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Updated): Proven Professional Techniques for Writing with Style and Power

A lead should be provocative. It should have energy, excitement, an implicit promise that something is going to happen or that some interesting information will be revealed. It should create curiosity, get the reader asking questions.

People is the one subject that everybody cares about.

Do not try to write everything about your subject. All subjects are inexhaustible.

The best-known one is Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary by Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis. Read that book or one like it.

Style is your writing. It is inexorably knotted to the content of your words and the nature of you.

Conversations stumble; they stray; they repeat; they are bloated with, you know, like, meaningless words; and they are often cut short by intrusions. But what they have going for them is human contact, the sound of a human voice.

“Why am I writing this?”

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.”

Style is not something you can put onto your writing like a new set of clothes. Style is your writing. It is inexorably knotted to the content of your words and the nature of you.