MBA2208 Must Read: On Writing Well by William Zinsser

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Business strategies, tips and motivation every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a must read episode. On our must Read Episodes, I share with you a book that has influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its takeaways, its insights and why you should read it too. Today's must read is On Writing well by William Zinsser. This book is an absolute hidden gem. It's very straight to the point advice on becoming a better nonfiction writer and as a business owner, everything is writing. That's what I learned in the last 20 years. As an entrepreneur. If you want to sell your products or services on your website, you got to make sure your sales copy is on point. Preparing for a speech on stage. Well, writing a great script is going to help you perform better and give a stellar speech. Recording a video for sales or even for a course. Want to win your crowd over? Well, your script is going to make it happen. Basically, writing is the mother of all skills when it comes to communication and convincing your audience you're worth their time, money and effort. So it makes sense to want to improve in this area. And that's why I was so interested in this book. I'm going to share with you what I learned from this book about what makes good writing, how this can improve your readership, get people to open your emails, read them, share them, get better at social media. All kinds of stuff that you can apply to your business. Also, talk about the mental game of writing, how to overcome some of your roadblocks and prepare yourself to actually write great copy. This is an incredible book. One of the best books that you can pick up to help make real tangible differences in your business with your writing. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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I want to jump into one of the biggest takeaways I got from this book on writing well, and it's almost like the theme of the book. And he talks about how to do this in different ways throughout the book. So what is this takeaway? What is this theme? Well, it's the idea that writing or really good writing is really rewriting. And the better you get at writing and rewriting, the better you get at writing. Let me explain because this is important. If you make it a habit to write every day and then look at what you wrote and rewrite it to make it better. And we'll talk about what makes it better in a moment. And you do that consistently every single day. You'll find that your writing, your original first draft, is going to start to get really good because your mind is already jumping to the rewriting and it's writing that quality kind of writing. This means that over time, not only is the quality of your writing going to get better, you're going to get faster. And that leads to one of the things that get echoed in the book over and over. And that's the idea of establishing a daily schedule for writing. One of the best habits I've picked up over the last couple years is journaling. This is something that I used to kick myself over not doing. Oh, I should be journaling. All the great people I know or study or read about journal. I never journal. And then I finally started to journal. And one of the things that has helped me is I don't kick myself if I miss a day or two or three or a week even. The problem with journaling is a lot of people feel like if they don't do it every day or if they skip a day, they kind of give up on it totally and they just never go back to it. I gave myself permission to say, hey, if you ever stop journaling, for some reason, something comes up, you get busy, you forget, you have a busy morning. No worries. Just pick up as soon as you are conscious of the fact that you've forgot to write or you forgot to journal. Sometimes it's the same day, sometimes it's two days later, sometimes it's a week later. But once I gave myself that permission, I actually became more consistent. The other thing that I did is also give myself permission to write anything, any length. So this means I didn't box myself in to say, hey, every day when you journal, you gotta, like, pour out your deepest thoughts. It's gotta be meaningful and moving. No, I said, omar, you have permission to write anything you want every single day. This is your time, this is your journal. You can make it whatever you want. So sometimes I write two lines about how I feel in the morning, and then I just jot down the things that are worrying me or my to do list even. Sometimes I have some sketches in there of ideas. Sometimes in my journal, I'll outline things that have been nagging me. Maybe a portion of a course I'm thinking about creating or a workshop. Sometimes in the margins, I have a shopping list. It doesn't matter. The point here is that writing should be free. And sometimes we put so much expectation on ourselves, this makes it harder to be consistent. So this is just some advice that I picked up along the way and have been using in my own experience that you may want to think about so that you can have that habit of writing over and over again every single day. Now back to On Writing well. One of the things that he talks about that is super helpful to writing well is your mindset not having a cluttered head. Having clear thinking becomes easier for you to have clear writing. If you're confused and frustrated, this is going to come out in your writing. So in order for you to have clear writing, easy to understand writing, which is what's considered good writing. You need to be clear in your head. And this is why I like journaling is because sometimes I just like to dump ideas because I don't really have clarity on these ideas yet, Whether it's for a workshop or my sales page or something that's just on my mind. I'm also mindful of the fact that when I'm about to write something important, like sales page copy, like emails, this is an art and art requires to have finesse and be in the right mindset. So if I'm rushing to get things done, like I gotta end work at 5 o' clock to make an appointment, that's not a good time to write. Okay, do something else then. Do your emails, run your meetings, whatever it is. I like to choose times where I'm feeling hopeful, clear, maybe in the morning, even sometimes Saturday morning. This gives me a chance to really come to the page, you know, where I'm writing with a clear head. One of the things that he iterates in this book is it's very hard to write really well right off the bat. Meaning if you write down a sentence, for example, it's very hard to make a perfect from the first time you wrote that sentence. Even if you decide to rewrite it two, three, four, five times, it's still kind of not perfect yet. So understand that when you write something, this is just the beginning. If you're unsatisfied with it, that's normal, okay? It shouldn't be satisfied because it's not the finished product yet. This is like marinating a chicken and thinking, oh, the chicken's done. No, you still got to cook this chicken right. You still have to do some other things before you're ready to serve. It makes total sense. Now I want to share with you some rapid fire advice I got from this book on writing well that I found super helpful. And you can just take these and run with them and apply them to your writing immediately. Here's a fun one. Use unexpected but refreshing words. I'm not talking about jargon or complex or words that most people don't understand or know. I'm talking about words that are just not common, that people know but just haven't heard in a while. Kind of spices things up. This leans into something else he says in the book is if you write something that you like, that you enjoy, that entertains you, there's a good chance your readers will like it too. So that's kind of a good barometer. Another tip is write in the first person. This allows you to get into storytelling mode. And people love stories because that's how we remember things, is how we retain things. This is how we are able to relate to one another. Read your writing out loud. I do this all the time, mostly for typos because I have some weird habit of forgetting words as I write or missing words, but also just read it out loud to see if it flows and it's easy to read and comprehend, but not silently out loud. Great writing is the ability to make the complex simple. And that's what makes great writers. Taking difficult ideas, difficult things to comprehend, difficult, even challenging or confronting ideas and making them simple, communicating them in an easy to understand way. The last sentence in a paragraph and the last paragraph in a section or chapter are power moments. They're powerful. Leaving your reader off on a high really adds to the value of your writing. So think about your last sentences in each paragraph and the last paragraph on the page or in the chapter. This gives the message to the reader consistently wow, this is good stuff, right? I love reading this person's writing. This book has a lot of great advice when it comes to editing your writing as well. How to prune out words that just are filler words that don't add value. Words like quite or very or kind of.

Or rather.

What I found is that when you use these filler words it makes the sentence longer. And the longer your sentences are, the harder they are to comprehend because they have to hold on to ideas for longer periods of time and the brain gets fatigued. So I like to write concise sentences that are to the point and remove the filler words as suggested.

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It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico. Today's must read on Writing well is a fantastic book. I think it's one of the best writing guides you can ever buy. I recommend buying this book in paperback so you can make notes, underline things, bookmark things so you can refer back to it when you're wr. I want to leave you in this must read episode on this note and it talks about your willingness to be a better writer. In order for you to write well, you have to actually want to be a great writer. You have to want to have better writing than other people. This means you got to be a bit competitive. You got to really fight the urge of writer's block and feeling that you're not good enough. It also means you have to be reading a lot because in order to know if you're better than other people, you got to read other people's work. This means obsessing over details, perfecting your craft and seeing this as a skill set. Like I gotta just become a better writer. Just like getting better at push ups or a sport or playing the piano. It's a skill you need to cultivate and go at it every single day. So that skill gets a little bit better every day, every moment. Every time you write it gets better. And it's a lifelong pursuit. Really. This really got me thinking because recently I've been thinking about writing a book. It's something that's been on my list of wanting to do for myself, for the business for the last decade. But I realized through reading this book how much I need to get better as a writer in order to write the book that I want. And this is going to require me to start writing now, right? Start writing that book now and rewriting it because it's just not going to come out of my head onto the paper magically. Thanks so much for listening. I highly recommend you pick up this book on Writing well by William Zinsser. Fantastic book. If you know somebody who's a business owner, a writer, a blogger, copywriter, anybody who wants to just communicate better, this makes a great gift, really. You can check it out on our show notes over at 100mba.net, just go to the blog page and you'll see the show notes to this episode. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you loved today's episode, hit follow on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode and you get every episode automatically as well as access to our archives of over 2200 episodes. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the reasons why I love to write is because there's a sense of accomplishment of writing something really epic, putting out in the world and people loving it. It's really a work of art because people don't really know why they love it because it's actually like a mix of a few things. The content, your style, the way it's written, the quality of the writing, the subject, on and on and on. So my goal of writing a book is still on the table. It's like for me, it's like producing a hit album. I want to create something special for the world that I can put out there for people to use and take advantage of for years to come. Set your goal. Set what you want to do with your writing. Whether it's a killer blog or even blog post. Or write that sales copy that converts like crazy. Or maybe a script to a killer speech you're going to be giving in 2023. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take.

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