edit

Cramming too many words on to a page

by

There is an option to stop writing.

There are also options to edit what’s already written, to cut, to shorten sentences.

More words don’t necessarily make it any easier to understand a message. As the 140-character limit of twitter demonstrates, communicating succinctly can be very effective: it concentrates the mind.

I can remember sitting in an exam and watching someone walk up to the front of the hall for more paper. I worried that I wasn’t writing enough. It didn’t matter: the few words I wrote answered the questions well enough for me to get an A.

I can remember a sales manager worrying about a tender and just writing more and more. In the end, they just repeated themselves to the point of confusion.

When standing up to deliver an elevator pitch, the most effective attention-grabber is often a pause.

Sometimes the words we leave out make those we do write and say even more powerful.

 

Zarywacz enters 15th year of business

by

I woke up this morning . . . so the song goes . . . and realised that we were entering our 15th year in business.

Phew! Quite a lot has changed over the past 14 years: I remember Simon and I discussing the internet back in the 1990s and how to prepare ourselves to take advantage of it. From taking an Adobe PageMill (remember that?) course, which turned into an html course, Simon built our first web site, which led to my then neighbours commissioning him to build a web site for their international travel magazine.

Now we use the internet and mobile communications without even thinking about what benefits we gain from them. They enabled me to move home and office from the densely populated and business-rich Thames Valley to beautiful and sparsely-populated North Devon. I still write, edit and proofread for clients across the UK and abroad too. It really doesn’t matter where we are located.

So we enter another year with great uncertainty in the economy. With governments nearly always causing more problems than they solve, it’s up to businesses to work our way out of the gloom they have inspired in the media.

Business is not always easy, but we’ve been here for 14 years and we’re preparing to be around for a while longer.

Visit www.z2z.com to see what we aim to be doing for clients in the years ahead.

email: hello@z2z.com
Telephone: 0333 0444 354