Business Bricks

Cory Doctorow on rewriting¹: “Here’s a procedure that I almost always find useful for improving almost any kind of written composition — a speech, an essay, an op-ed or a story. As a first pass, try cutting the first 10 percent (the “throat clearing”) then moving the last 30 percent (the payoff) to the beginning of the talk (don’t bury your lede!²). About 90 percent of the time when someone gives me a paper for review, I find that it can be improved through this algorithm.” ¹ Cory’s post discovered via the comments on this also useful SvN post on the same subject. ² = lead. Journalists sometimes spell it this way to avoid ambiguity with the typographical term leading.