I don’t know if you’re like me, but although I enjoy writing, I’m not the biggest fan of reading. If you want to get me to read, you’ll need to write in a way that’s interesting and easy to breeze through. Tell me a story, grab me with a relevant heading or opening. Let me get in and out quickly, but first, inform me with your short sentences and relevant facts! To get started, I recommend a little brain dumping.
You may know what you want to write about, or better yet, what you need to write about, but getting started isn’t always easy. Here’s what I do.
I dump everything I have into my Word document. Everything from my brain, every little bit of the story from what I copied from reference documents, plans… everything relevant. I call it “brain dumping.” How it reads isn’t important at this stage. Just gather it. It’s always better to have more than less.
When I dump a lot of thoughts and information on a page, it let’s me get to the part I enjoy quickly — the writing!
Who am I talking to? What do they need to know? Why should they want to read what I have to say? Pull out that content from your document of dumped content. What do you want them to do once they read it? Pull that out too.
My next step is paring it all back. I take out anything that’s not necessary or repeats itself. That thins out what’s there. Then, I sort it in a way that tells a story in the most logical order with the most important message first.
Now get writing!
Writing for you. 