A handy journalist technique whereby you write in such a way that even a cursory glance at an article gives the key facts, and the further you read down you increase your knowledge with the next most important facts. As opposed to say, a chronological account of an event where the important stuff may be at the end. The BBC at least are great examples of this, for instance in a Premier League match write-up.

Given how people read on the web generally, it’s pretty good to keep in mind for anything you write on the web too.

Also see: the best writing is rewriting, front load names to cue attention

Inverted pyramid writing.

A variation of Murphy’s law whereby if you happen to be criticizing someone else’s spelling or grammar you’ll have a mistake yourself. Or should that be criticising?

Muphry’s Law

With two small children, we’ve spent a lot of time reading and listening to A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh recently. The children love it, but so do the adults. If you haven’t read them for a long time you could do much worse than try them again. There is a lot of wisdom in those books. As one small example, I find there’s a lot of owl speak around as we get older, where we could all probably benefit with a dose of Pooh’s simplicity. For example, in another story Owl explains:

“Well, the customary procedure in such cases is as follows.”

“What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?” said Pooh.

…”It means, the Thing to Do.” says Owl.

How to speak plainly, by Pooh Bear.

I find myself linking to this article about why your links should never say click here for links on the web that I thought I should just get it down for easy reference. The solution, generally, is to rewrite your sentence. For more about writing for the web, click here. Only joking, check out more tips about writing for the web.

Also see: Omit unnecessary words, use styling instead of colons, cognitive overhead and the best writing is rewriting. 

Rewrite to avoid click here

— and much nicer than using parentheses (). And —to go the full mile —why not use an en dash when you’re separating your page numbers 1–5 or months May–Sep next time?

Most writing tools and OSes have tricks to do these automatically for you.

Know your dashes: the hyphen, en dash and em dash

The best reference I found on quotations was the quotation section in Larry Trask’s Guide to Punctuation. Alongside clarifications [ ] and suspensions … it contains rules on fun things like quotes in quotes, when to capitalise, dealing with mistakes [sic], adding emphasis [emphasis added], and punctuation inside or outside. On this last point he suggests:

"You may follow your own preference in this matter, so long as you are consistent. If you opt for logical punctuation [putting the punctuation outside the quote], you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you are on the side of the angels, but you should also expect some grim opposition from the other side [that prefers punctuation on the inside]."
— Larry Trask

Quotiquette: The etiquette of quoting

One of the best things we did when on a significant traveling trip was to make our journal as a mindmap. There are all sorts of reasons why we found it better and more enjoyable to do at the time and better and more enjoyable once returned. Get a better idea than this sketchplanation by flicking through our mindmap travel journal

Try a mindmap travel journal

And, ideally, only exclaim exclamations. Woah!

Only quote quotes

Learned from On Writing Well by William Zinsser. It has two pages worth the price of the book by themselves. They show the same pages that made it into the book with editing marks all over them. At a glance it made me understand the work and craft that goes into writing and that I can do it to.

Sketchplanations tagged with writing