Most of us rely on our words to drive business forward these days.

In her 2014 bestselling book Everybody Writes, Ann Handley pointed out the obvious:

If you work in the Knowledge Industry, you will be expected to write.

Not just once in a while to complete assignments like you may have in school.

But a lot. And often.

Writing matters more today, not less.

Your social profiles depend on writing.

Those texts you’re firing off all day long? 

Writing. 

Sales letters, product proposals, scopes of work, promotional materials, web copy, landing pages, podcasts, video scripts.

Writing, writing, and more writing.

And how about that inbox? 

Who among us these days isn’t writing emails?

Is Your Writing Working?

In the work I do with clients, the challenges I see with writing aren’t the kind related to knowing how to write. They have that pretty well covered outside of a few common grammatical pitfalls that plague just about everyone.

The challenge I see more often than not is knowing what to write about and then making sure it matters. 

Written content without purpose becomes aimless.

It’s an old cliché and I’m going to use it anyway because I haven’t found one that works as well as this one:

Writing without purpose is like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

It can be fun. It can feel freeing in the moment.

But long term it leaves you scattered, maybe even embarrassed.

Not to mention with a mess on your hands you don’t really want to clean up.

It’s definitely not a sound writing strategy.

Finding Meaning and Purpose

So how do you go about finding meaning and purpose in your writing so your writing does what you want it to do (e.g. connect with an audience, showcase your expertise, land new clients, etc.)?

Here are three things to consider:

1. Once you’ve written a draft of something, ask yourself “So what?”

So you failed Organic Chemistry your freshman year in college. Why should anyone care? Your job is to build connections for your reader between something that happened to you and what it means to them on a broader scale.

2. What is universal about your experience?

There’s a reason the Star Wars franchise has generated a gazillion dollars. The stories speak to universal themes our brains are hard-wired to gobble up like a PacMan eating digital dots. 

3. Don’t be afraid to tell people what to do in your writing.

Not in a “I’m the boss of you” kind of way. No one likes that. Rather, in a specific way that is designed to help them solve a problem your writing is talking about. People don’t want to have to think too hard about something they’re reading. Don’t make them try to figure out the secret message hidden in the layers of your prose.

This list of three things to consider is one example of how to do this. 

It’s simple and straight to the point. Through questions and specific examples I am guiding you to think differently about what you write so that a door opens for you that up until now has perhaps remained locked.

So that the next time you sit down to write something, you approach it through a new lens.

If you can answer a definitive yes to the question, Does your writing have a clear purpose? then the odds that your writing will work for you in a positive way are in your favor.

And you can leave throwing spaghetti at the wall to the cooks whose meaning comes from making it come out just right.