It’s dead winter, the height of cold and flu season. I’d just signed in behind a patient who left the front desk of the doctor’s office, sniffled and went on a coughing jag. Why hadn’t I used my own pen? When the receptionist called me back up to get insurance information, I spied the hand sanitizer on her desk and requested a squirt in my palm.

That’s when I thought of hand antiseptic as an editor, eliminating the bad, and increasingly, with added skin moisturizers and conditioners, enhancing the good. The palms and fingers, nails and knuckles remain along with the bones and muscles on which the hands rely. Only the nasty germs are gone. The fungi are finished.

Successful editing leaves great structure alone. It eliminates elements that threaten the transmission of the message, recasts unclear or awkward phrases, and enriches the underlying work.

Used correctly, hand sanitizers can keep disease at bay, leaving your body healthy. Editing, when well applied, not only makes a document readable, clear and accurate, but enhances your reputation as someone who cares about the facts, the message and the best way to convey them.

Clean up the germs that make your writing feel sluggish and under the weather. The health and well-being of your enterprise may depend on it.

Yours in communicating clearly,
Marilyn J. Shaw, MBA
Well Put LLC

The launch of this redesigned website seems the perfect time to start a blog.

I’m not completely new to blogging. A couple years back, when I was an editor in the Business News department of the Richmond, Va., newspaper, I initiated a blog on surviving the economic downturn. As it turned out, that downturn afforded me the opportunity to re-create myself and start Well Put LLC.

In coming posts, I hope to inform and entertain you with my musings about communications. Some ideas immediately come to mind, such as providing the answers to frequently received questions about the writing art, self-editing tips, or providing the back story to some recent work (with the client’s permission, of course).

For this experience to be mutually beneficial, your feedback is essential. That goes for this blog as well as for this website as a whole. Tell me what you like and dislike, when you agree or disagree. Ask me what you always wanted to know about writing or editing to improve your internal or external communications, or how to navigate the roadblocks that keep you from starting – or completing — the Great American Novel. Think of it as free consulting.

That’s communications. The conversation starts now.

Yours in communicating clearly,
Marilyn J. Shaw, MBA
Well Put LLC