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Welcome to Purple Ink Writing, the source of inspiration, and help for accidental writers. If you are looking for business communication tips, want to improve your writing, seek motivation, or simply need a distraction from working on an exceptionally boring document – you came to the right place! 

 

Recent Articles

Meeting survival guide
May 16, 2010

Imagine a meeting. You’re trying to focus on what’s being said, but all you can think about is “This is such a waste of my life. Why am I here?” The clock’s hands aren’t moving and you begin to suspect that the air has been sucked out of the room and replaced with sleeping gas. Sounds familiar?

While we’re all busy and keep running out of time, we can’t avoid getting sucked into black holes of pointless meetings that leave no survivors. Is it the way of the universe to force us to slow down or simply the price we have to pay for working with humans? Anyway, bewailing “Why, God, why?” isn’t going to solve the problem, so let’s talk about what might.

 

2 comments
What's in the background?
May 2, 2010

Most of the documents you produce will outlive their context. While working on a document, you may be (better be) crystal clear about why it’s being written and what it is supposed to accomplish. However, a month from now, would you (or whoever may open it) be able to tell the reason the document was created, its purpose, who contributed to the content, and what defined the scope? What about a year from now? If these aspects are not clearly spelled out – most likely, someone will call you with questions. From experience, they usually call when you’ve already moved on to another project and can only muster a vague recollection of the document out of bits and pieces from the “not relevant anymore” file in your brain.  

 

0 comments

Make it printable
May 26, 2010

Today I received an email containing documentation for an important meeting scheduled to take place later this week. I was about to print one of the documents, an Excel workbook, and decided to “print preview” it first, and good thing I did – it was not set for print.

So, muttering “is it too much to ask?”, I began to:
-        format the tables to make them reader-friendly,
-        adjust layout, paper size, % of normal, and margins for optimal fit of the content on a page,
-        insert header and footer (sheet name & page number),
-        set “header row repeat”.
2 comments

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