Emails, texts, social media, guides, eBooks (real books?), proposals, job descriptions, business plans, web pages, and more.
You may not consider yourself a writer, but as a business owner, you do a lot of writing that has a big impact on your business.
It pays to write well. Literally.
A good email or post could make you thousands of dollars in new patients.
Unfortunately, the only training most PTs have is in writing lab reports or English essays, which is usually not the kind of thing that connects with patients, partners, or employees.
When you try to write casually, it probably ends up as a stream of consciousness that often fails to keep your reader’s attention or get your point across.
If you want to improve, you need to practice writing differently, so here’s the one tip that will improve your writing more than anything else:
Find the common thread.
Search for the one important principle, idea, metaphor, theme, or object that connects everything you are saying.
Then work it into your entire piece, beginning, middle, and end.
Don’t forget it or you’ll wander off on tangents or jump around to various topics, creating confusion.
Stay focused.
You should end where you started, but improved.
You want your writing (and your reader) to spiral upward.
Just like you want your patients to continually reinforce and improve what they are doing.
Your thread doesn’t have to be deep or complicated.
It could be something as simple as a funny joke you keep referring to.
Or it could be a story about a patient or personal experience.
Or it might be a single lesson you want your subject to learn (like the proper way to do a squat).
Anything to keep you on message and tie your thoughts together.
To practice, the next time you sit down to write an email or social media post, write down your common thread at the top of the page before you start.
Your writing will immediately improve.
Your open and response rates will increase.
You might even get more likes.
Your business will benefit.
Because whether you realize it or not, being a business owner means being a writer.