Speaker 1: Hello there, it's Amantha. I'm currently on a Christmas break,
Speaker 1: so I've handpicked a bunch of my favorite episodes from
Speaker 1: the last year to share with you. Okay, on with
Speaker 1: today's best of episode. Do you want to improve your writing?
Speaker 1: Maybe you want to create a snappier headline or email
Speaker 1: subject to make sure your message gets noticed. Or maybe
Speaker 1: you want a better way to find those pesky grammatical
Speaker 1: errors before you send your email or a report that
Speaker 1: you've been drafting. Or perhaps you've just sent a nice
Speaker 1: font that you like but you don't know how to
Speaker 1: find out which one it is. Well, stay tuned because
Speaker 1: this episode will help you do all that. My name
Speaker 1: is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the
Speaker 1: founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how
Speaker 1: I work a show about how to help you do
Speaker 1: your best work. Writing is one of the fundamental ways
Speaker 1: that we persuade people to take up our ideas, meet
Speaker 1: with us, or buy the thing that we are selling.
Speaker 1: So today I want to share some cool tools for
Speaker 1: improving your writing. So here are four things that have
Speaker 1: really helped meet. First is the Hemingway app. So Hemingway
Speaker 1: is a website where you can paste in what you've
Speaker 1: just written. So let's just say you've written an email
Speaker 1: or maybe a report, and you paste all that text
Speaker 1: into Hemingway. What it does is it analyzes a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of things to help you improve your writing. But
Speaker 1: the feature that I like most is that it tells
Speaker 1: you what level of education someone needs to understand your writing.
Speaker 1: So do they need an undergraduate degree? Do they need
Speaker 1: a year three level of education? So Whatingway recommends is
Speaker 1: that you target your writing to a year nine reading level,
Speaker 1: so as in students that are in year nine in
Speaker 1: the 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 nowadays. 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 coschedule. That's cooschedule dot com, which has what
Speaker 1: they call a headline analyzer. Now, what this tool lets
Speaker 1: you do is if you're thinking about a heading for something.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe it's a heading for an important email
Speaker 1: that you want someone to read or to open, or
Speaker 1: maybe you write reports or articles as part of your job,
Speaker 1: and you need a compelling headline so that people actually
Speaker 1: want to read the report or whatever it is that
Speaker 1: you're writing. There's an art and so clients to writing
Speaker 1: great headlines. That entice people to read whatever you've written,
Speaker 1: so on co schedule. The Headline Analyzer tool helps you
Speaker 1: write better headlines by analyzing your headline or your title
Speaker 1: for whatever you're writing, and it gives you tips on
Speaker 1: how 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 fonts,
Speaker 1: or trying to improve the look and feel of something
Speaker 1: that you're working on. Maybe it's a report, and maybe
Speaker 1: you're a little bit sick of using Times New Roman
Speaker 1: or Aeriel or Helvetica. So this is a really awesome
Speaker 1: 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: Hello there, that is it for today's show. If you
Speaker 1: enjoyed today's episode, why not share it with someone else
Speaker 1: that you think would benefit and maybe get some useful
Speaker 1: tips to improve the way that they work. How I
Speaker 1: Work is produced by Inventing and with production support from
Speaker 1: Dead Set Studios. And thank you to Martin Nimba who
Speaker 1: does the audio mixport every show and makes everything sound
Speaker 1: so much better than it would have otherwise. See you
Speaker 1: next time.