Eight top tips on how to improve your writing:
1. Avoid jargon and recognise your organisation’s own jargon: the important thing here is to think about the reader. Acronyms, abbreviations and other jargon are helpful timesavers internally but not always appropriate outside your organisation.
2. Proofread: getting three people to check a document should ensure you pick up most errors. Pick your organisation’s best spellers and grammar aficionados and ask them to check anything that’s being published before if it finalised.
3. Be consistent. Always express times, dates, and numerical information in the same way. For example, 4.30pm or 16:30, 4 July or July 4th. Decide how your organisation will express certain words and stick to them: organisation or organization, GCSE or G.C.S.E.
4. Use capitals correctly. Proper nouns (such as people’s names) need capital letters, common nouns don’t. Volunteers, trustees, campaign, charity, sponsors are all common nouns. Just because they are important doesn’t mean they need to begin with a capital letter.
5. Keep sentences short, particularly when writing for the web. Using the active rather than passive tense helps with this. E.g. ‘The campaign raised over £10,000’ (five words) instead of ‘Over £10,000 was raised by the campaign’ (seven words).
6. Use visual words: language like ‘take the next step’ and ‘a helping hand’ can resonate with readers and make what you have to say more memorable.
7. First person or third person: Using ‘I’ or ‘we’ instead of the third person (the charity, it) can bring warmth and friendliness to your writing and help you communicate in a more relaxed way. Consider it for some of your communications if you are usually more formal.
8. Common spelling errors: lots of people get words like complement and compliment, their and there, effect and affect mixed up. If there are words that confuse you, jot them down on a post-it for quick reference, keep a dictionary to hand or take a moment to search online - search ‘affect or effect’ will usually give you a quick answer.