Adverbs Are Killing Your Writing.

0:00I've written a best-selling novel, but I took the writing lessons that I have that apply to both books and ads and outbound and everything and put it into nine lessons that if you use them, I think it will make your writing better. Enjoy. Alex's guidelines for writing. As soon as you see all of these, you'll see it in all my writing. Cuz the thing is is a lot of people when they try and like pretend to sound like me, they think I sound smart. And so they put lots of really complex words and sentence structures. It sounds smart because it's simple. Like you interpret it as it sounds smart, but because it's actually simpler, which takes [music] more effort. It's present voice. Like you'll mix your tenses up all over the place. I just try and do present tense whenever I can. It's active, not passive. Iron doesn't get the strength beaten [music] out of it. We beat iron.

0:43Like the body was carried out of the room. We carried the body. Active. So it's present whenever I can or it's simple tenses. No adverbs. Usually adverbs are [music] placeholders for shitty verbs. We shut the door really hard. We slam the door. Short sentences almost always max one comma. And whenever you have like two comma like it's like blah blah blah, comma, and then a thing. Usually you can just rip it out or reframe it so it's just one sentence or make it two sentences. And then again, the vocab is under third grade. Ideally, fifth grade, positive language. And I mean that not like upbeat, but like don't stop, keep going cuz people can't perceive negatives.

1:21like don't think of a pink elephant then people think of the pink elephant. So if you're trying to communicate clearly then don't say what they shouldn't do say what they should do. If I say don't stop versus go different or keep going. When there's really common sayings like don't stop [music] that's so common that we've already shorthanded it in our brain as what it means. But if you do with an like a a more atypical statement don't leave the facility is different than stay inside. It [music] just it just it's easier to understand. Like remove redundant words.

1:48We simultaneously walked out the big door at the same time. We walked outside and then I always eliminate anything from a sentence that if I read the sentence afterwards, it still means more or less the same thing. I just cut it. But it's just like video editing. If I watch the video and I cut out a part and then I watch it again and I don't miss it, it's killing darlings. You know what I mean? But that goes for words, too. Like if I have a couple words in a sentence that I cut it out and it still means the same thing, I go with it.

2:17Hemingway has like six of those built into it. So Hemingway I literally think is the greatest writing tool that's ever been like created. It gives you fast feedback cycles because as you're typing it changes the color. So in terms of immediiacy of like feedback and it shows you cuz it's color based what mistake you made. Mistake you know just not Hemingway. And these are not like Alex's rules for writing. They're more just like rules for good writing. This is how I do it. And so like you put all those things together and that's like more of my voice. If you like this video and you're a business owner who wants to break through your current revenue ceiling, I distilled every lesson from scaling 10 businesses past 10 million and three businesses past 100 million into a completely free scaling road map that I've used to go from 0 to 1, 0 to 10, and 0 to 100 plus. And so you can click here and you can check it out.

3:00Again, absolutely free. And since you're a business owner, appreciate you and uh enjoy.