Speaker 1: Do you want to improve your writing. Maybe you want
Speaker 1: to create a snappier headline or email subject to make
Speaker 1: sure your message gets noticed. Or maybe you want a
Speaker 1: better way to find those pesky grammatical errors before you
Speaker 1: send your email or a report that you've been drafting.
Speaker 1: Or perhaps you've just sent a nice font that you like,
Speaker 1: but you don't know how to find out which one
Speaker 1: it is. Well, stay tuned because this episode will help
Speaker 1: you do all that. My name is doctor Ramatha Imber.
Speaker 1: I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science
Speaker 1: consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show
Speaker 1: about how to help you do your best work. Writing
Speaker 1: is one of the fundamental ways that we persuade people
Speaker 1: to take up our ideas, meet with us, or buy
Speaker 1: the thing that we are selling. So today I want
Speaker 1: to share some cool took for improving your writing. So
Speaker 1: here are four things that have really helped me. First
Speaker 1: is the Hemingway app. So Hemingway is a website where
Speaker 1: you can paste in what you've just written. So let's
Speaker 1: just say you've written an email or maybe a report,
Speaker 1: and you paste all that text into Hemingway. What it
Speaker 1: does is it analyzes a whole bunch of things to
Speaker 1: help you improve your writing. But the feature that I
Speaker 1: like most is that it tells you what level of
Speaker 1: education someone needs to understand your writing. So do they
Speaker 1: need an undergraduate degree? Do they need a year three
Speaker 1: level of education? So what Hemingway recommends is that you
Speaker 1: target your writing to a year nine reading level, so
Speaker 1: as in students that are in year nine in the
Speaker 1: Australian system, so I guess about a fifteen year old.
Speaker 1: So apparently this optimizes your writing so it's super easy
Speaker 1: to digest and understand. And why I really like this
Speaker 1: is I find I have a tendency to write using
Speaker 1: language that maybe overcomplicates things, and when I paste my
Speaker 1: writing into Hemingway, it just reminds me to keep it simple,
Speaker 1: use short sentences, and don't use big words where a
Speaker 1: small word will do. So that's Hemingway. I highly recommend it.
Speaker 1: Another tool that I love is Grammarly, which is germmrly
Speaker 1: link to all this in the show notes. Now. Grammarly
Speaker 1: is a plug in which means you can incorporate it
Speaker 1: into your email browser such as Chrome, and this means
Speaker 1: you can use grammarly when you're on web based applications
Speaker 1: such as Gmail, for example, where a lot of writing
Speaker 1: is done, so grammarly will point out with beautiful green
Speaker 1: underlying where you have made grammatical errors, just like word
Speaker 1: processing software typically does nowaday. So I find Grammarly useful
Speaker 1: for websites such as Gmail or LinkedIn where I'm doing
Speaker 1: some of my writing, because it improves what I'm saying
Speaker 1: and I also get some grammatical lessons along the way.
Speaker 1: The third tool I want to cover is from a
Speaker 1: website called co Schedule. That's cooschedule dot com, which has
Speaker 1: what they call a headline analyzer. Now, what this tool
Speaker 1: lets you do is if you're thinking about a heading
Speaker 1: for something. You know, maybe it's a heading for an
Speaker 1: important email that you want someone to read or to open,
Speaker 1: or maybe you write reports or articles as part of
Speaker 1: your job, and you need a compelling headline so that
Speaker 1: people actually want to read the report or whatever it
Speaker 1: is that you're writing. There's an art and science to
Speaker 1: writing great headlines that entice people to read whatever you've written.
Speaker 1: So on Coschedule, the Headline Analyzer tool helps you write
Speaker 1: better headlines by analyzing your headline or your title for
Speaker 1: whatever you're writing, and it gives you tips on how
Speaker 1: to make it better, how to make it more engaging,
Speaker 1: and essentially how to make it more clickable if you
Speaker 1: think like that. And again, even if you're not a
Speaker 1: journalist writing clickbait stories, you are writing emails every day
Speaker 1: most probably, and you're possibly not thinking about how important
Speaker 1: the subject line of your email is in terms of
Speaker 1: getting people excited to open it. So check out headline Analyzer. Now,
Speaker 1: the final thing I'll say about writing is that I'm
Speaker 1: a bit obsessed with fonts or typefaces. So often I'll
Speaker 1: see a really beautiful font and I'll be like, I
Speaker 1: wonder what fund that is, but I have no way
Speaker 1: of knowing, which is where myfonts dot Com forward slash
Speaker 1: what the font comes in, where you can literally import
Speaker 1: the image of a font and it will tell you
Speaker 1: what font or typeface it is, which I think is
Speaker 1: pretty awesome. If you are, say designing a presentation, and
Speaker 1: maybe you're doing a bit of a refresh on your
Speaker 1: fonts or trying to improve the look and feel of
Speaker 1: something that you're working on. Maybe it's a report, and
Speaker 1: maybe you're a little bit sick of using times New
Speaker 1: Roman or Aeriel or Helvetica, so this is a really
Speaker 1: awesome tool for discovering new fonts that are catching your eye.
Speaker 1: So those are four tools to help you do better writing,
Speaker 1: and a link to all of those in the show notes.
Speaker 1: So that is it for it today's show. If you've
Speaker 1: enjoyed this episode, why not share it with someone else
Speaker 1: who does a bit of writing and maybe could benefit
Speaker 1: from knowing about these cool tools. So that is it
Speaker 1: for today and I will see you next time.