What's your writing style? Mine is garbage!

Okay, so you know well enough that I am a huge geek. No hiding it, I love writing, I love reading, and I love spending hours and hours on the Internet reading absolutely pointless nothing. I'm fortunate enough that my job completely caters to my geek-dom. Today we had a PR writing class to learn how to become more effective writers. Now, I'm going to give you some tips that he gave us, but you must promise me not to read what I just wrote in this paragraph and judge me for not implementing these techniques. I'm tired, and I just really want to make sure you have this pertinent information. So take it and quick judging me.

Ahem.

Five simple rules for clear writing (which you think you knew, but may have forgotten):
1. Focus on key messages
2. Fewer and shorter words
3. Use visual verbs
4. Active voice...weeee.
5. REVIEW AND EDIT

After going over key messages and trying to write an entire op-ed piece in just one syllable words, I realized how verbose my writing has become. What's funny is I feel like I always make exceptions for the client thinking, "Oh, no this is just their style, how they like it." Then it hit me: that's just because that's how I supply the writing.

One of the coolest things I got from the workshop was a super handy link.... BullFighter. The service looks at sentence structure in Microsoft Word (it only works in XP, not Vista and not Mac) and flags where complicated words should be simplified for readers. It's based on the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale which you can test by dropping in your written documents, releases, etc. here.

So I went to back to my desk after the class to a release open on my desktop that was in progress only to find out that I'm the worst writer, ever. The good news is now, however, that I have a 25 page booklet from the class teaching me how to improve.

So as always, look for great things.