Stepping away from Your Digital Environment
In an age of social media and nonstop news cycles, PR pros are under tighter deadlines than ever to turn around writing assignments. Not only is our writing expected to touch on a wider range of global events, such as global warming and Brexit, but also topics involving increasingly specialized knowledge, like virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
Among the challenges we face, though, many digital tools we depend on to write with can limit our fresh thinking and natural writing style. Although computer applications, screens and keyboards have become second nature to us, they’re not the only writing tools we have, and they can encumber us in producing our best work.
In my role as writer over the past 15 years, I’ve developed several practices that can help remove writers from their digital confines to help them better synthesize concepts and generate ideas. I invite you to try the practices below the next time you face a tough writing assignment, and remember that it’s crucial to explore every weapon in your writing arsenal to meet today’s PR content challenges.
Change environments – To inspire fresh thinking, find a space away from your computer and usual workspace – a conference room or breakroom – that will allow you to get away from email, phone and people distractions. This will not only remove normal disruptions, but it will take you away from the comfort zone of that familiar screen, desk and chair to allow you extra sharpness in your thinking. The key is finding a space that is quiet but also has enough background activity to keep you alert and even slightly uncomfortable.
Print out important documents – One limitation of a computer screen is that it confines your ability to look at many documents in a single glance. This ability is important when you’ve researched and collected several pieces of information and are ready to assimilate them into an outline. Being able to see multiple items at the same time allows you to better inculcate them and churn out an outline that captures everything. For these reasons, I recommend printing and spreading out important documents on a table, highlighting key sections, and then looking at them in a single view while turning away and letting your thoughts flow to your fingers, and typing them in an outline.
Don’t be afraid of thinking time – Allow time to distance yourself from your computer, think deeply and not worry if your fingers aren’t striking a keyboard. We’ve become conditioned to equate making progress in writing with typing or producing blocks of text, but you can make some of your best progress when your hands are idle and you allow yourself to carefully synthesize ideas. The typing and text will flow from this thinking time and take care of itself. And don’t worry if you get stuck trying to find the right words in some parts. When this happens, move on and let your thoughts incubate. The brain is amazing in its ability to continue processing a problem in the background, and you can come back to a tricky section just 10 minutes later and find you have a solution.
Proof on hard copy – This cannot be overstated. To review the logic and organization of your writing better, as well as to spot grammar and style blemishes, get away from a computer screen and review on paper. Proofing this way allows you to read text more naturally, enabling you to look down instead of straight ahead. Moreover, regarding my first point above, proofing this way lets you take text with you to an optimal location where you can review with a keener eye.
Use a Q-and-A format in a crunch – Although not related to digital limitations, a final writing tip that can be a life-saver in conquering a difficult project is to frame an article in a Q-and-A format instead of a full-form article. The benefit of this is that it doesn’t require the cohesive beginning, middle and end of a standard article, and the transitions between paragraphs needed to make an article read smoothly. Instead, nuggets of content can be written out in response to tailored questions, with no segues needed between different sets of questions and answers. Give it a try.