4 basic—but absolutely paramount—writing reminders

The amount of overwrought, boring, long-winded, clunky and just plain lousy writing in this world is astounding.

Even in professional, corporate environments–especially in professional, corporate environments—the landscape is littered with throwaway, mindless content that doesn’t merit a mention.

To be fair, writing well is a daily mental grind that requires endless amounts of creativity and discipline. Improvement requires years’ worth of practice, edits, mistakes, resilience and rewrites.

There’s no fast-track to success, but it always helps to keep the basics in mind. Let’s start with these four:

1. Write a spicy headline. How often do we save the headline for last? This is a terrible habit that afflicts writers of every ilk.

Start by crafting a headline that compels customers or colleagues to click. Use jarring words that pique curiosity, and tinker with different phrasing and juxtapositions. Test different headlines to see which ones get more clicks.