Do Speakers Really Need Writing Skills?
Post by Sigrid Macdonald
If you’re a professional speaker, you may wonder what the point is of polishing your writing skills. Maybe you use index cards when you’re speaking, or have an outline of bullet points in front of you. Perhaps you deliver your entire brilliant speech right off the top of your head. Why waste precious time improving your writing when speaking is your goal?
First, many speakers deliver presentations on Excel or PowerPoint. Your thoughts are immortalized in print for your audiences to see.
Second, in order to book speeches, you’ll be writing e-mails, blogging, writing an e-zine or maintaining a website. Maybe you’re active on Twitter or Facebook, LinkedIn or Self Growth. It’s embarrassing to have typos or grammar errors in any electronic medium, and it won’t help your sales if readers, companies or agents think that you’re sloppy or illiterate.
Third, perhaps you have a product. You may have written a book or produced audio clips of yourself speaking. You don’t want to send out a formal letter talking about your “CD’s!” CDs is the correct term.
I’m a book coach, an author, and an editor; out of the 50 full-length manuscripts that I’ve edited, I’ve noticed a common thread. Most people make the same mistakes. They write run-on sentences, not knowing when to use semicolons, colons, periods and dashes. (They also don’t know the difference between an em dash and an en dash ˜ do you?) They stumble over word usage, becoming confused about when to use loath and loathe, further and farther, or less and fewer. Almost everyone misuses apostrophes and puzzles over the plural or the possessive. By and large, my otherwise excellent, bright and ambitious clients rely far too heavily on the imperfect spell-check and have difficulty organizing information.
My latest book, Be Your Own Editor, addresses all of these issues in an informal style. It has three pop quizzes so that you can test your knowledge along the way. It’s fun and it’s dense with information. Most importantly, it will prevent you from making the most egregious mistakes that are so easy to do.
Be Your Own Editor is available at Lulu.com as a 6 x 9 paperback for $17.99 or as an e-book for $8.99. Read more about it: [http://beyourowneditor.blogspot.com/]. Leave me a comment and I’ll respond back. I love to hear from people. Or send me a friend request on Facebook [http://www.facebook.com/sigridmac] and read my regular writing tips there.
Here’s to writing the right way.
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One Response to “Do Speakers Really Need Writing Skills?”
Sigrid Macdonald
April 6th, 2010
Just wanted to add that originally, I self-published Be Your Own Editor, but it has since been picked up by
TotalRecall Press in Texas and will be republished soon!