February 7, 2017
Interview with Mary Kate Mackey, author of the book Write Better Right Now
Mike Carruthers: When you think about all the emails, texts, memos and everything else you write you probably write a lot. So what makes writing good writing?
Mary Kate Mackey: Good writing is when the idea is communicated swiftly, clearly, and without a doubt about what you’re saying.
Mary Kate Mackey, author of the book Write Better Right Now says when you’re writing anything ask yourself…
What’s the point? Can you name the point? And the second thing you can do is you can jack up your verbs. You can go back to a piece of writing and look at all of the verbs because sometimes there’s simply a better verb, a stronger verb, a more descriptive verb.
Also when writing beware of the passive voice.
You go though and you look at your sentence and you say, “OK will it make sense if I added the phrase by zombies?” For instance “the hedge was clipped…by zombies”. If you can add that and it makes sense you’re in the passive voice. Being in the passive voice is usually not good. You want to be in the active voice. You want to have things that move, verbs that go places and push the thinking along.
And be careful how you use punctuation like exclamation marks.
There was a famous professor who basically said you have, I don’t remember the number, of exclamation points for your lifetime – use them wisely.
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