Keep Schoolin’ Yourself.

I never was what you would call an avid reader. I enjoyed it, found it to be an entertaining escape at times. But it wasn’t until I began my journey as an entrepreneur, I realized that the continued education I needed to get ahead, wasn’t going to magically come to me via osmosis (although that would be pretty sweet). It was going to take reading. A lot of reading.

The digitization of modern communication has put the written word front and center in our everyday lives. We are constantly texting, tweeting, emailing, bbm’ng, g-chatting and the like. I swear we probably write more with our thumbs than the rest of our hands! We all understand that our ability to effectively articulate our thoughts, solutions, expertise and sentiments are cardinal elements of any entrepreneurial business. Everyday we’ve got to create blog posts, ad copy, auto-responders, headlines, sub-headlines. All of which are crucial elements contributing to our success.

The process of improving how we communicate is invariably different for each person. But regardless of how it happens, it’s really just about doing it. You can’t work on your swing if you don’t go to the cages right? I was given a cool little book this past Christmas called The Elements of Style that has helped a ton with those annoying little grammar principles we often forget. Things like: its vs. it’s, when to use among vs. between, and all the dreaded rules about punctuation.

So… since I missed out on having a tweed-laden professor in corduroys with a constellation of crumbs in his beard teach me all these golden nuggets of grammar, I have this handy little text which I recommend.

It’s funny when you become a parent, and it’s time to help with homework, you realize school’s never really out. Keep improving everyone.

All my best,

Jay Kubassek

p.s.  I found it online here: http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/style.html. But I would say grab it on Amazon so you can refer to it more readily when you have questions.

Posted: June 9, 2010 
Filed under: Jays' Letters
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