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Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content QUOTES

Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content QUOTES

1 " Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation. "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

2 " As content strategist Jonathon Colman, who works for Facebook, told me: “Start with empathy. Continue with utility. Improve with analysis. Optimize with love. "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

3 " Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple. —Woody Guthrie "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

4 " A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper. —E. B. White "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

5 " In an online world, our online words are our emissaries; they tell the world who we are, "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

6 " The truth is this: writing well is part habit, part knowledge of some fundamental rules, and part giving a damn. "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

7 " Assume the reader knows nothing. But don't assume the reader is stupid. "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

8 " Your customers don't buy your product to do your company a favor,” Eghbal said. “They're doing it because your product makes their lives better. So if you want to sell something, you need to explain how you're helping them. "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

9 " So, before you begin the writing, be sure you know the purpose or mission or objective of every piece of content that you write. What are you trying to achieve? What information, exactly, are you trying to communicate? And why should your audience care? "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

10 " If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot,” Stephen King writes in his book On Writing. "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

11 " Good writing serves the reader, not the writer. It isn't self-indulgent. Good writing anticipates the questions that readers might have as they're reading a piece, and it answers them. "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

12 " Because at some point, you do have to rush your own art. Otherwise, your art sits on its butt on the couch eating chips and salsa. However "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

13 " Empathy—like writing—isn't a gift. It's a discipline. It takes some intentional effort and diligence to develop enormous empathy so that you can apply it to your writing. "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

14 " Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there'll always be better writers than you and there'll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that—but you are the only you,” author Neil Gaiman said in a 2011 podcast.1 "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

15 " Shed the obvious. There's no need to include in this article, in this post, in regard to, I've always felt that, we are of the opinion that…You get the idea. "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

16 " quality content means content that is packed with clear utility and is brimming with inspiration, and it has relentless empathy for the audience: "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

17 " Typos happen, of course. And keep in mind that a robot spellchecker can't catch all of them. Consider this alarming blunder in a recipe printed in The Pasta Bible, issued by Penguin Australia in 2010: the book recommended seasoning a dish of tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto with “salt and freshly ground black people,” according to a news story in the Guardian. No recall was made of the books in circulation, but the publisher destroyed the remaining 7,000 printed copies, at a cost of $20,000.1 "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

18 " I use what I call a ‘writing ladder,’” David told me. “If a tweet resonates—it gets a bunch of RTs and at replies—then I consider it good blog post fodder. If a blog post resonates, I'll explore it with a riff in a speech and maybe another blog post or two. If a series of posts on the same topic resonates, that's my next book. "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

19 " Brevity doesn't mean bare bones or stripped down. Take as long as you need to tell the story. (The length of content is dictated by the kind of content you're creating.) The notion of brevity has more to do with cutting fat, bloat, and things that indulge the writer and don't respect the reader's time. Keep it tight. "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

20 " Chicago-based marketer Andy Crestodina writes an outline of a piece and then makes the main points its headers. Then he fleshes out the outline in a kind of fill-in-the-blank exercise. For him, “great writing isn't written, as much as assembled,” Andy told me. "

― Ann Handley , Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content