Writing Rules: How to Write Better
and editing professionally (and a lifetime of writing for fun),
distilled into the most important perspec- tives that I think can
help all of us up our writing game.
This would be a good time to thank Neil Patel and
Kathryn Aragon, coauthors of The Advanced Guide to
Content Marketing (2013). Their guide helped me to
conceptualize how I might present to you what I'd been
doing—without putting much conscious thought into how I
was doing it—for those 25 years. If you're looking for a handy
reference for much more than writing, check it out in full at
bit.ly/AdvancedGuide.
I hope that the rules in this section will help you to
better organize and develop your writing—and to choose
better words, craft better sentences, and consider things like
cadence and flow, and many others that I'll stop specifying
right now so you can just get to it . . . !
If you have never written—if you are an "adult-onset
writer" who is perhaps recovering from some trauma that
made you consider yourself an inept writer—this section
provides some helpful processes and structures to help you
get started.
If you've been writing for a while, here is some
