On that first gloriously warm day of the season, isn't it great to push open the windows and let some fresh air inside?  Even if it's not warm yet where you are — or if it never got very cold in the first place — this is a great time to let some of that spring energy bring a "breath of fresh air" to your copy.

By copy, I mean just about anything that’s written about your business:  brochures, sales sheets, online content, and more.  That can be a lot to wrap your head around, so what we’ll focus on here are three things that will definitely make a difference, no matter where you want to focus the effort. 

Shake Off the Dust
Take a look at the range of communications you've got on hand . . . lay them all out together.  It’s easy to get tunnel vision, if you’ve been creating one piece at a time, so a review of everything all at once can be a real eye-opener! 

• How old are the message points you’re using?  
• Do they represent where you are now, and what you want customers to know?  
• Do you have new information to share?  How about additional benefits to highlight? 

Maybe it doesn’t make sense to revise old pieces, but try to decide what your top three message points are for the next several months.  Anyone who reads any of your new pieces, from this point onward, should be able to name at least one of those points. 

Enjoy the Breeze
When you’re paying the printer’s bill, it’s tempting to put as much as possible on a single page.  But there’s a price to pay:  Trying to cram too much onto one page is overwhelming for readers, and they'll usually discard it rather than sort through what looks like too much to absorb. 

• How “full” are your pages? 
• How easy are the words to read?  
• How long are your paragraphs?
• Does the most important information really stand out?

Your goal is to make it as simple as possible for a reader to pick out the most important information in your printed materials. 

First, make it easy for a reader to “breeze” through by leaving plenty of white space — that’s the area on a page that isn’t printed on.  Much like home decorating, the goal is to create an impression of spaciousness.  Avoid cluttering the page.  Use underlining and bold type — even bullet points and headlines — to draw your reader’s eye to what matters most.  Next, keep the font big enough for comfortable reading and don’t mix a lot of different typestyles. 

It won’t be easy.  As writers, we tend to become very attached to every word we write, so cutting any of them out can be painful.  But the reward is well worth the effort!

Get Active
For this step, I’ll ask you to hearken back to middle school English class.  Do you remember the different between an active verb and a passive verb?  Here’s a quick review:

Passive voice:  Three prospects were contacted by the sales rep.
Active voice:  The sales rep contacted three prospects.

It’s a subtle difference, but what happens when you focus on using the active voice can go a long way toward tightening and strengthening the impact of your message.  Passive verbs — and the extraneous phrases they tend to spawn — will bog down the flow of your message.  Aim instead for active verbs and words that carry more punch. 

Hint:  Microsoft Word will often provide grammar guidance in written documents.  Next time you see a sentence with those squiggly green underlines, right-click and see how you might rearrange that particular sentence.  It’s not always what you want, but it can start to help you see the difference.

Once you start looking to “activate” your verbs, you’ll naturally start to use fewer words to make your point . . . and you’ll begin seeing other ways to say more. 

As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Start where you are, use what you’ve got, and do what you can.”  Just take it one piece at a time, moving forward and aligning everything so it all points you in the same direction:  Toward success.