Get moving in the right direction

Think of writing guidelines as your team’s GPS for moving from good writing to great. These are rules you agree to live by to boost your ability to reach more readers, get the word out and move people to act.

We’re not talking about a style guide here. Consistent style is essential, but it’s not going to move the needle on the bottom line. This is not the place to tackle whether to use the serial comma or add a hyphen to “email.”

Writing guidelines address bigger issues: How do we write to get readers to pay attention to, understand, remember and act on our messages?

Get everyone on the same page

Now you can get everyone — writers, managers, approvers and reviewers — on the same page with writing guidelines based on the best practices Ann shares in her popular writing workshops.

With these guidelines, your team will:

• Know what to do with “the book” of Ann’s proven-in-the-lab best writing practices.
• Understand how to do it with before-and-after examples of your team’s own work to illustrate each technique.
• Sell new techniques to reviewers with brief summaries of the research behind the rules.
• Quickly implement the guidelines with handy one-page checklists that team members can use to review their own work or to edit others’.

BONUS: Because Ann will be rewriting some of your team’s messages to illustrate the guidelines, your team will be able to see “How Ann would have done it” in class. That’s the No. 1 “wish we’d done it” feedback we hear from writing workshop participants.

Here’s how it works:

• Send us 30 of your group’s writing samples in Word.
• In 30 days, you’ll receive guidelines and checklists based on proven-in-the-lab best practices.
• Your guidelines will include before-and-after versions of your team’s own writing samples.

Tip: Roll out your guidelines in an in-house writing workshop. You’ll save 25% and get more out of both services.

✔️ Yes! My team needs writing guidelines and checklists of proven-in-the-lab best practices.