Have you been thinking about bringing me in for a writing workshop early next year?

TIME CRUNCH Ann's fully booked for 2011 workshops and already booking 2012 engagements. If you're looking for a writing workshop, call Ann now.

If so, let’s act fast.

I ran out of 2011 workshop dates in August this year — several months earlier than usual. (Thank you to all those of you who brought and are bringing me in to work with some fabulous communicators in fascinating organizations this year!)

As a result, my first quarter 2012 is already filling up. As I desperately want to work with you next year, please contact me today if you’re looking for a writing workshop in the first few months of the year.

No expenses in 2012

I’m offering a new No Surprises — No Expenses fee plan for 2012 workshop that should make both our lives easier.  No Surprises — No Expenses is just what it sounds like. My inclusive fee covers my customized workshop plus all travel and miscellaneous expenses, including:

• Air transportation within the continental United States
• Accommodations
• Ground transportation
• Meals
• Parking
• Shipping and courier services
• Phone calls
• Internet access
• Incidentals

You don’t need to worry about whether I fly first class or no-class, take a limo or the bus, sleep at the Ritz or in my car, dine on caviar and champagne or chomp on Cheetos and Diet Coke. I don’t have to collect, collate, scan and send receipts. You don’t have to do battle with the bean counters to get my invoice paid; I don’t have to stand by for my check while you fight with accounting. You know exactly what your expenses will be well in advance; I know I don’t have to hassle with paperwork.

No surprises: No expenses. No kidding.

How may I help you?

Please let me know how I can help your team members Think Like a Reader, Cut Through the Clutter, Write for the Web and otherwise get the word out in 2012.

Let’s talk!

Tears welled and teeth gnashed last month after the world’s last office typewriter factory — Godrej & Boyce in Mumbai, India — announced that it would close.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE How do our writing tools affect our writing? (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)

(The last portable typewriter factory, Swintec in Moonachie, N.J., is still cranking them out. Swintec survives on prison contracts for clear typewriters in which inmates can’t hide contraband, as well as the occasional model for filling in birth certificates and other forms.)

As for me, I couldn’t be less nostalgic about the passing of the typewriter. I haven’t missed ribbons or Wite-Out® since I sat down in front of a Vydec CRT screen in September 1979.

One look at the dot matrix orange type on that flickering charcoal background, and I was hooked.

Still, the loss of the machine that’s helped writers compose their prose since the 1870s did prompt me to ponder writing tools and their effects on writing:

Does how we write,
I wondered,
affect what we write?

To answer this question, I turned first to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. In addition to probing how the Web is rewiring the human mind, Carr also takes readers on a brief tour through the history of writing.

Scriptura continua creates the scribe.

It all started with scriptura continua (that’s Latin for continuous script), an early form of writing that used no spaces or punctuation marks between words or sentences.

Scriptura continua was tough to read — and even tougher to write. That’s why Classical Greek and Latin writers often outsourced the actual reed-to-papyrus process to professional scribes. Face-to-face dictation reduced writers’ urge to reveal TMI, which cut down on erotica and tell-all memoirs.

Word spaces lead writers to write …

But when word spacing and punctuation were introduced in about 1000 AD, the physical act of writing got easier. Writers picked up their own pens and started putting words to the page. The result, Carr says:

“Their works immediately became more personal and more adventurous. They began to give voice to unconventional, skeptical, and even heretical and seditious ideas, pushing the bounds of knowledge and culture.

“Working alone in his chambers, the Benedictine monk Guibert of Nogent had the confidence to compose unorthodox interpretations of scripture, vivid accounts of his dreams, even erotic poetry — things he would never have written had he been required to dictate them to a scribe. When, late in his life, he lost his sight and had to go back to dictation, he complained of having to write ‘only by voice, without the hand, without the eyes.’”

… and edit.

Writing themselves, “with the hand and the eyes,” authors could edit their copy carefully for the first time. (Something that’s a little difficult with dictation.)

Writers could also for the first time see their manuscript as a complete piece. That allowed them to eliminate the redundancies that had plagued literature during the Middle Ages.

As they refined their words, writers also refined their ideas. Their arguments became “longer and clearer, as well as more complex and more challenging,” Carr says.

The typewriter tightens prose.

Flash forward a few hundred years to 1714. That’s the year Englishman Henry Mill created the concept of the typewriter when he filed a patent for “an artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another.”

It took more than 100 years to perfect Mills’ idea. The first successful commercial typewriter, introduced in 1870, was Danish pastor Malling Hansen’s “writing ball.” If a porcupine and a Remington had a baby, the writing ball would be it.

Nietzsche’s mother and sister gave the German philosopher one for Christmas. He hated it. But Nietzsche, an early adopter, did learn to compose using this new technology. As he did, Carr writes, his copy became more dynamic:

“One of Nietzsche’s closest friends, the writer and composer Heinrich Köselitz, noticed a change in the style of his writing. Nietzsche’s prose had become tighter, more telegraphic. There was a new forcefulness to it, too, as though the machine’s power — its ‘iron’ — was, through some mysterious metaphysical mechanism, being transferred into the words it pressed into the page.

“‘Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,’ Köselitz wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, ‘my “thoughts” in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.’

“‘You are right,’ Nietzsche replied. ‘Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.’”

T.S. Eliot had a similar experience when he started typing his poems and essays instead of writing them by hand, Carr reports:

“‘Composing on the typewriter,’ [Eliot] wrote in a 1916 letter to Conrad Aiken, ‘I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.’”

In 1957, Jack Kerouac adapted the 100-plus-year-old writing tool when he set a 120-foot scroll of paper behind his typewriter and fed the leading edge under the roller. Over the next three weeks, he banged out a single-spaced, paragraph-free novel about a series of cross-country trips he’d recently made.

Kerouac edited On the Road heavily before it was published. But in 2007, publishers released the original manuscript to commemorate the novel’s 50th anniversary. Reviewers found the unedited version to be a “dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges.” Stripped of the “sort of eager-beaver poetizing” of the edited version, they said, the novel felt “much more immediate and even contemporary.”

Plus, they cooed, in the unedited version, “Kerouac’s jazzy voice is unimpeded by pesky commas.”

Word processing spawns debate.

Less than 10 years after Kerouac’s experiment with Benzedrine and sheets of drawing paper he’d taped together, the next evolution in writing tools commenced. That was the year IBM introduced the MT/ST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), the predecessor of the modern word processor.

Almost immediately, writers began debating whether composing by computer could possibly be a good thing. Today, an earnest few even clamor for a return to writing by hand.

Shari Wilson, a college English composition teacher, for instance, says college students write better by hand in class than when they compose essays on computers on their own. With computers, she writes in Inside Higher Ed, they get distracted by the mechanics — margins, fonts, line breaks — instead of focusing on writing. Moreover, writing by hand, she believes, may bring writers “closer” to their work.

She doesn’t have to convince crime novelist Richard Price, author of Lush Life. As he told NPR’s Terry Gross:

“It’s too easy to fiddle, and you’re under the illusion you’re working, when basically you’re vamping because you can do all of this stuff. I think I’m going to do this in, you know, Swedish Helvetica, and maybe this would look good in Diablo or whatever the hell that is.

“So you spend like two hours, and you haven’t done anything on the book. When before this, I was always handwriting on a legal pad. And you couldn’t fool around when you’re doing handwriting, like go back and change this and that. It was just too labor intensive, and it sort of forced you to go forward.”

And Elmore Leonard, author of Get Shorty and other novels, agrees. He says:

“A pen connects you to the paper. It definitely matters.”

What’s next?

So where do we go from here?

New technologies are already influencing writing, Carr reports:

• PowerPoint. O’Reilly Media recently published a book about Twitter created in PowerPoint. And Jennifer Egan used the presentation software to write a chapter of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad.
• Social media. It’s only a matter of time, Carr writes, before we’ll subscribe to services that update our e-books with comments and revisions added by fellow readers.
• SEO. Writers and publishers will optimize book pages and chapters for Google rankings, Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You, told Carr. “Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers,” he predicts. “Chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank.”
• Smartphones. The three top-selling Japanese novels in 2007 were written on mobile phones.

As for me, I can barely compose a tweet, let alone a novel, on my iPhone. But should the day come, I believe we’ll embrace that skill well before the last laptop factory shuts its doors.

One thing we know for sure: Our writing will be different for it.

What about you? How has technology affected your writing? Let me know.

Write better, easier faster

Want to deliver copy that gets read?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a persuasive writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a writing workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to improve your skills in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s upcoming webinars.
• Learn more: Study Ann’s learning tools. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: And find 2,000 writing tipsheets at RevUpReadership.com.

Did you ever take your mom’s toaster apart to figure out how it worked?

BEG, BORROW OR STEAL Imitation is the sincerest form of professional development

You can do the same thing with writing.

It’s called modeling the masters: studying the best writing out there for technique, form and process, then incorporating what you’ve learned into your own copy. It’s the best way I know to polish your skills.

To get started, choose a piece of writing you love. Then take it apart and put it back together until you understand why you like it and what the writer did to make it that way.

In my clip file, for instance, I have a short piece about Las Vegas from Time magazine. I collected it for a single sentence:

“Lounge music may be to the symphony
what Velveeta is to cheese — but hey! —
it’s all part of what make Las Vegas great.”

Take it apart.

Here’s what I love about that passage:

• The analogy format (blank is to blank what blank is to blank)
• The word “Velveeta” (cheesy brand names are always fun)
• The full sentence with an exclamation point between the dashes

Identify the template.

So now you know what to do: Write a sentence with two comparisons compared to each other, a cheesy brand name and a full sentence with an explanation point between dashes in the middle. The template looks like this:

“Blank may be to blank what (funny brand name) is to blank — hypershort sentence! — something.”

Put it back together.

When I asked participants in a workshop to model that passage, they came up with:

“Youth hostels may be to the Hyatt what love beads are to diamonds — but hey! — it’s all part of what makes your Adventures Ltd. vacation great.”

“Facilities Management may be to corporate America what ‘Baywatch’ is to ‘Masterpiece Theater’ — but hey! — facilities don’t manage themselves.”

I’m not really sure that second one works. But I do know this: You’ll see me write “something may be to something what ‘Baywatch’ is to ‘Masterpiece Theater’” before the year is out.

Try it yourself.

Now I’ve got one for you to model — this passage from Loren D. Estleman’s The Midnight Man:

“It was one of those gummy mornings we get all through July and August, when the warm wet towel on your face is the air you’re breathing, and the headache you wake up with is the same one you took to bed the night before. Milk turns in the refrigerator. Doors swell. Flies clog the screens gasping for oxygen. Everything you touch sticks, including the receiver you pick up just to stop the bell from jangling loose your tender brain.”

Take it apart. Find the template. Then use the template to write your own passage using Estlemen’s techniques.

Email me the best Estleman by April 21, and I’ll send you a little surprise.

Make Your Copy More Creative

Want to communicate better with creative copy?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a creative writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a “Make Your Copy More Creative” workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to make your copy more creative in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next “Art of the Storyteller” webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s learning tools on storytelling, metaphor and human interest. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find creative copywriting tipsheets at RevUpReadership.com.

Ever wish you had a writing coach — sort of a personal editorial trainer? In customized one-on-one consultations, I’ll help you jump-start your writing skills, recharge your batteries and get your creative juices flowing.

PERSONAL TRAINER: Make Ann Wylie your writing coach. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)

We’ll work on your own copy — not made-up assignments with little relationship to your work. You’ll learn how to:

• Sell your ideas with reader-centric writing
• Organize your copy so it’s easier to read — and write
• Make your information more creative and compelling
• Measurably improve readability
• Lift your ideas off the page
• And more

Communicators at such companies as Fleishman Hillard, H&R Block, John Deere, Nokia and VSP (Vision Service Plan) have already worked with me to polish their writing skills. If you’re ready to take this important step to improving your own work, contact me.

Because of increasing demand for my programs, I’ll be increasing the fees for my writing workshops on Jan. 2. Now, for a limited time, you can lock in 2010 fees for 2011 programs.

To get this year’s fees for next year’s programs, you must complete booking (that is, get a signed contract and deposit to me) by Dec. 31. To book a program, contact me directly.

We’ve revved up RevUpReadership.com, the toolbox for writers, is now better than ever. Now she’s faster, friendlier and more fascinating — not to mention waaaaay better looking.

You’ll find:

• New sections on creative communications and communication planning
• Tips and templates for executive messages, survey stories, tipsheets and more stories you find yourself writing daily
• Old favorites like Visual Thesaurus, the monthly Rev Up Readership newsletter and discounts and priority scheduling on my learning tools, writing coaching and communication report cards
• More tips than ever — more than 2,000 and growing!

Gold members: Be the first to check out RevUpReadership.com II. Let us know what you think.

Silver members: Go for Gold! Apply your remaining investment in your Silver-level membership to a Gold membership and get all the benefits of RevUpReadership.com.

Not yet a member? What are you waiting for? Sign up today.

REV UP YOUR WRITING: Get more tips at the NEW RevUpReadership.com.

“Rev Up offers one the best values for the dollar for any publication that I’ve subscribed to. There’s not a lot of theory — just tons of useful advice.”

— Robert Anderson, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Make sure your copy makes the grade

Too often, the job of producing communications leaves little time for considering what you’re doing well and what opportunities you have for improvement. Our writing report card can help.

Send us a sample of your work, and we’ll send you a report card on its strengths and weaknesses, plus more than two dozen metrics for improvement. Your report card will help you:

• Increase readability
• Lift your ideas off the page with scannable copy
• Polish your headlines, links and other display copy
• Otherwise improve your writing

Ask for a report card on web writing, persuasive writing or other writing.

Wylie Communications president Ann Wylie — whose own communications have earned more than 60 awards, including two Gold Quills — will review your work.

STRAIGHT A's. Get a report card covering more than two dozen metrics on your writing. Learn techniques you can apply today to improve your grade: Bit.ly/WritingReportCard

Put yourself in good company

These organizations have already improved their communications with our reviews:

• American Business Women’s Association
• Accenture
• Crider Associates
• Harland Clarke
• HP Enterprise Services
• Intertec Publishing Company
• Iron Mountain
• Kalmbach Publishing Company
• Mountain America Credit Union
• Nursing Journal
• PartnerRe Group
• Pendleton Memorial Methodist Hospital
• The Principal Financial Group
• Providence Health & Services
• Providence St. Peter Hospital
• Sprint Corp.
• Saint Luke’s Health System
• State Farm Insurance Company
• Universal Technical Institute
• Vision Service Plan (VSP)
• Walgreens

“I have never, or maybe rarely, had members send emails following a session expressing how much they enjoyed a session. I received at least five following this session.”

— Mary Deming Barber, APR, Fellow PRSA, PRSA Alaska
Find out what others say about Ann’s workshops

It’s the good kind of problem to have: PRSA Alaska and the Architecture/Engineering Marketing Association of Alaska both had a little extra money in the bank. Which made chapter leaders ask …

“We’re saving our money … for what?” says AEMAA program director and president-elect Leah Boltz. “We wanted to take our money and really provide a benefit for our members.”

That’s when Boltz had the brilliant idea of bringing me in for a chapter writing workshop in Anchorage. (Little did she know her chapter would wind up with even more money in the bank!)

The secret? A comprehensive PR and marketing plan, as you might expect from these two groups. Among the elements of the plan:

• Offer popular topics. “Our members were interested in writing tips, and their bosses seemed interested in paying for it,” says Mary Deming Barber, APR, Fellow PRSA, and Boltz’s partner on this project. “We positioned the event as one that appealed to anyone who writes for a living, not just public relations professionals. This meant we could reach out to people beyond our own membership and was likely a key to success.”
• Promote aggressively. The publicity team created an extensive plan, targeting people who weren’t members of PRSA or AEMAA and involving individual outreach.
  • Reach out. Publicity team members asked each board member to send the invitation to at least 10 people who were not members.
  • Make it personal. Fundraisers contacted fundraisers; journalists contacted journalists.
  • Tap other markets. Event planners distributed fliers at chapter meetings of other groups, like associations of press women and marketers.
  • Go social. Leaders also published the event on the chapters’ Facebook pages and in a series of tweets.
• Get a sponsor. The chapters secured two corporate sponsors who contributed $1,000 in exchange for logo usage and one free seat at the event. Sponsors also provided graphics for the publicity and made workbook copies.

Two weeks before the workshop, the event had sold out. Even after asking the hotel to reconfigure the room to accommodate more seats, chapter leaders had to start turning people away.

Attendance: More than 100 people — some who flew in from Fairbanks — attended the program. Still, chapter leaders had a substantial waiting list.

“If you consider our chapter has 130 members, and we had 110 at the luncheon, that’s a fairly good ratio,” Barber says. “Attendance at our monthly lunches has been between 30 and 40, down from previous years.”

Between 25 and 35 people usually attend the meetings of AEMAA, which has 50 member firms.

Member service: In a follow-up survey, 100 percent of attendees said they wanted PRSA and AEMAA to bring me back for another workshop.

“I have never, or maybe rarely, had members send emails following a session expressing how much they enjoyed a session,” Barber says. “I believe I received at least five following this session. There were also tweets and other discussion about how much individuals learned and requests to be part of future programs.”

Revenue: The event brought in $17,120. After expenses, the chapters split more than $7,500 in profit. Which means they now have even more money in the bank.

What will they do with the extra cash?

“Reinvest it in educational programs and more member benefits,” Boltz says. “Save it for Ann Wylie next year!”

Learn more about my chapter programs and discounts.

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc., a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Wylie is the author of RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. She has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills, for her work.

Copyright © 2010 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.

Do you have the skills and knowledge you need to …

a

1. Write copy that gets read instead of tossed?

2. Select and use the best structure for organizing information?

3. Use creative material to engage the reader, versus a dull, just-the-facts-ma’am approach?

4. Incorporate the most powerful form of human communication — storytelling — into the piece?

5. Translate numbers and otherwise clarify complex concepts with metaphor?

6. Surprise and delight readers with wordplay?

7. Make your copy clear and easy to understand?

8. Gather the information you need to write copy that grabs and keeps reader attention?

9. Create display copy — headlines, decks, callouts, cutlines and subheads, for instance — to communicate to flippers and skimmers?

10. Work intelligently with a designer to create pieces that enhance readability as well as looking good?

11. Write quickly and well without suffering the obstacles of writer’s block or procrastination?

12. Write Web copy that overcomes the obstacles of reading on the screen?

13. Present and package information on the Web to reach readers online?

14. Write online microcontent — links, headlines, and so forth — that gets the word out on the Web?

15. Write PR pieces that are among the small percentage (3 percent to 45 percent, depending on which study you look at) that actually get used?

16. Come up with fresh ways to approach even repetitive topics and messages (as opposed to writing the same old story over and over again)?

17. Make the approval process efficient and helpful versus a time-consuming, morale-sapping procedure that reduces the effectiveness of your communications?