When I was establishing my consultants practice in 1990 I set about creating a book. The book was aimed at helping people to progress in their careers and shows how to assess yourself, prepare an interview winning resume’, market yourself and win the job at interviews, plus other real life tips.

Anyway I enjoyed the writing process, thought the book was good and sold a few copies. The effort of writing the book was not rewarded by the number of copies sold. I did not really have a low cost route to market.

In building my web site and writing a weekly newsletter I have realised that I do enjoy writing and drawing on my experiences. So recently I have been thinking of writing another book for sale on the internet.

Guess what? I got my original book out, re-read it and I am editing it as my next internet publication. The point of this article is to tell you what I realised when I read my ‘masterpiece’.

I had been living in the corporate world and the book was written in corporate style. Formal, the grammar was convoluted, too many long words. It was not easy to read and I did not like the style. The content is excellent but I did not like how the book was written.

Bearing in mind when I originally wrote it 15 years ago I read and re-read it in an effort to do a good job. That I now do not like the writing style came as a shock. Which shows that our skills and perceptions are changing all of the time and no matter how good we think we are at any one thing we can always do better.

If you’ve got anything that you created a while back it may be worth having another look at it. Your style may have changed and you may be able to improve it.

My son writes for his living and he has experienced the same with some of his early writing.

By writing for the web my style has changed, hopefully to a more readable form because I still like writing.

Tip: learn from the mistakes of others, you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.

This article was posted on November 30, 2005