After editing other people’s writing for a lifetime, I am firmly convinced that most writing flaws are based on mistakes that individuals make repeatedly. As a service to the world of writing and mankind in general, I hereby offer PRWriterExtraordinaire’s 10 Top Tips to Better Writing: (for Tips 11-20, e-mail us and we will forward them your way).

1. Avoid the passive voice. This is one of the most common mistakes made in writing. Tip: every time you come across the word ‘by,’ it’s the passive voice. Even appallingly literal spell check can recognize this. The ball was thrown by John. No: John threw the ball.
2. Use apostrophes in possessive clauses. English offers something aiding in conciseness and precision that Romance languages do not and that is being able to eliminate a possessive clause beginning with “of” with an apostrophe. No less a writer than Jorge Luis Borges, himself a master of English and Spanish, pointed this out when comparing the two languages. Tip: review the “of” in your copy and change them: ‘The Pride of America’ becomes ‘America’s Pride.”
3. Omit needless words. (See E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, p. 23). Clauses that begin with “It is…that” can almost always be eliminated. “It is clear that” becomes “clearly.” Good adverbs can replace many ill-considered constructions. As it is U.S. political season and the Democratic and Republic conventions are coming up, one will hear a great deal of the candidate “is a man (or woman, thank god) who” instead of the more straightforward, “He is” or “She is…” Gerunds (words with “ing” in them) also assist this quest. “I hate to work” can become “I hate working.”
4. Nouns and verbs. There are thousands of verbs in English, so dip into the well and use them. Auxiliary verbs—have, had, is, was – should not carry the verbal ball. “He had the ball” is weak. “He held, threw, pitched the ball.” Much stronger. Take this opening passage from Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls: “He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.” Amusingly, it could be edited to read “the pine-needled forest floor” and the wind blew “in the pine tree tops” but that would be correcting a master, wouldn’t it? Even so, it’s a good strong passage with nouns and verbs.
5. To, for and on. Find these words in your writing and figure out how to eliminate them. “The effect on the environment” can be “environmental effect.” “I gave the ball to John” can become “I gave John the ball.” Compress wherever possible.
6. The glories of the period. This is not the Victorian period; we are not judged by the elegance of our long sentences and their dependent clauses. Look at your too-long phrases and find a place where a period would fit. Drop it in there and see how other unnecessary words slip away.
7. Write positively. “Not” is another writing bump in the road. Get rid of it if you can say it affirmatively. “I do not remember” can become “I forgot.”
8. Most clauses in the middle of a paragraph are extraneous. We warm up and say our topic sentence, then support it and finish the idea. Usually the stuff in the middle is ineffective. Scrape it away and you have a better argument.
9. Understand the difference between written and spoken words. For example, one of the most common grammatical errors is misunderstanding how to say “Between you and me.” In spoken speech, it is often “between you and I.” Grammatically incorrect, but now part of common usage. (Between governs the preposition “I.” It sounds strange to say “Between I but that is what happens when people say “between you and I.” It should never happen in print.
10. The worst PR mistake ever? More news releases than I would ever care to count begin with the awful phrase: “We are pleased to announce” or “We are very excited that.” If you aren’t happy or excited to announce something, then don’t do it. The sheer fact of announcing something implies positive feeling.

For more writing tips, contact us at rrotman@prwriterextraordinaire.com.