Business Tools Blog

The audience for this blog, can benefit from Copywriting Commandment #10: Keep your copy clean and concise.

After you write your first round of copy, read it out loud. Also, have someone else read it to see if they understand the message and the call to action. As you edit, cut unnecessary words and consolidate ideas. See if you can get your text down to 30 to 50 percent of what you started with. Also, include bullet points and possibly subtitles to make it easy to read-and, more important, easy to scan–as most readers scan a page before deciding whether or not to read all the details.

I proof read a lot of documents. Many of the errors that I clean up occur over and over again. Some of these might be Zayo specific guidelines, others apply to everyone.

1.  Get the words right

• Describing how to do this is hard, Seth Godin gave in example in his blog “The power of smart copywriting:”
  • The marketing example points out how to spot: redundancy, negativity, ambiguity, and fibbing

2.  Consistency

• Use the same font, colors, and line spacing throughout your presentation
• Use the same number of decimal places , e.g. if you use 2 decimal places, in one area of the presentation, always use 2 decimal places in the presentation
• Use the same number/date format throughout the document, e.g. if a negative number looks like this (1,000) in the presentation, it should always look like this (1,000) - not like this -1000, or this (1,000)
• Use the same abbreviations  throughout a presentation, e.g. if you use Sep. in one place don’t use Sept. in another
• Make sure your numbers tie throughout the presentation, if you say October sales were $300K in a bullet point, then the graph showing sales results should also say that October sales were $300K

3.  Spelling

• Make sure that you spell company names correctly. e.g. at&t is correct, AT&T is not correct
• Having the full legal name of a company is typically not necessary in a high level presentation - leave off the LLC, Inc, Corp
• Colocation is spelled Colocation, not Collocation
• To abbreviate a quarter, use 1Q not Q1 … why?  because when you add a date 1Q09 easily translates to 1st quarter 2009, while Q109 is non-nonsensical

4. Formatting

• Titles should be in Proper Case (the first letter is upper case and the remaining letters are lower case)
• Pictures/Graphs/Tables should not be stretched vertically or horizontally (drag a corner or use the Format Object window)
• Make sure that objects are aligned
• Make sure that white space is evenly distributed on the page