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Writing is fun!
By: Michael Harrison When I was establishing my consulting practice in 1990, I set about creating a book. The book was aimed at helping people advance in their careers and shows how to assess yourself, put together a winning interview resume, promote yourself and win the job in interviews, plus other real life advice.
Anyway I enjoyed the writing process, I thought the book was good and I sold a few copies. The effort of writing the book was not rewarded by the number of copies sold. It really didn't have a low-cost route to market.
By building my website and writing a weekly newsletter, I have found that I enjoy writing and drawing on my experiences. I have recently been thinking of writing another book to sell on the internet.
Guess what? I pulled out my original book, reread it, and am editing it as my next internet publication. The aim of this article is to tell you what I realized when I read my "masterpiece".
He had been living in the corporate world and the book was written in corporate style. Formal, the grammar was complicated, too many long words. It wasn't easy to read and I didn't like the style. The content is great, but I didn't like how the book was written.
Considering that when I originally wrote it 15 years ago, I read and reread it in an effort to do a good job. That I don't like the writing style now was a shock. Which shows that our abilities and perceptions are changing all the time and no matter how good we think we are at something, we can always do better.
If you have something that you created a while ago, it may be worth taking another look. Your style may have changed and you can improve it.
My son writes for a living and has experienced the same with some of his early writings.
When writing for the web, my style has changed, hopefully to a more readable form because I still like to write.
Tip: learn from the mistakes of others, you cannot live long enough to make them all yourself.