Everybody Writes Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“As writing teacher Don Murray said, “The draft needs fixing, but first it needs writing.”1”
― Ann Handley, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

“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

“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

“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

“Brain Pickings by Maria Popova, a self-described human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.”
― Ann Handley, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

“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

“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

“The Writing GPS acts as your guide. It subs in Go Push Shine for the usual words (Global Positioning System) to make the GPS acronym our own. Our Writing GPS has three distinct parts: Go (1–4): The prep and research groundwork Push (5–10): The writing and the rewriting Shine (11–17): The polishing and the publishing”
― Ann Handley, Everybody Writes: Your New and Improved Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

“So, whenever possible, specify geranium instead of flower, as Natalie suggests. Or substitute cocker spaniel for dog. Or write Vietnamese sandwich truck instead of food-truck service. Or Alan Arakelian from Accounting instead of client.”
― Ann Handley, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

“Details paint a fuller, clearer, picture and give readers necessary footholds for getting more involved or vested in the writing.”
― Ann Handley, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

“Be specific enough to be believable, but universal enough to be credible.)”
― Ann Handley, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

“Here's some content trivia. The print publishing industry made up lede to replace lead. It was done to avoid confusion in a publishing world that used lead (the metal) to set type by hand, and in which lead referred to the amount of spacing between the baselines of text—as measured in strips of lead inserted between lines of type (text). These days, lede and lead, when used to refer to the opening of a story, are interchangeable.”
― Ann Handley, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

“Why am I creating this? What's my objective? What is my key take on the subject or issue? What's my thesis? My point of view? And, finally, the critical So what/Because exercise: Why does it matter to the people you are trying to reach?”
― Ann Handley, Everybody Writes: Your New and Improved Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

“The first words of every sentence should make a friendly first impression to encourage the reader to keep going—much the way a favorable first impression at a party encourages conversation”
― Ann Handley, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

“Said another way: we are a planet of publishers, but many of us are littering the landscape with content crap, squandering the whopping opportunity we have to communicate directly with those we are trying to reach.”
― Ann Handley, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

“So the question becomes: Are you telling your story from your unique perspective, with a voice and style that's clearly all you?”
― Ann Handley, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

“Words are indeed our emissaries and ambassadors, carrying important messages for us. “Words are a proxy…a stand-in for the things that we as people and we as companies want to convey to the world,” Beth Dunn says.”
― Ann Handley, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content