Beauty Is Pain

I do a lot of persuasive writing for my job. It may be writing grant proposals, final reports, appeals, or thank you letters. All of them are very carefully written. Even our form letters go through multiple drafts before we print out the batch of them (actually, they are most important since hundreds of people will be seeing them [we also update our form letters every year, because they should not stagnate, plus information changes]).

Working with my boss is the most amazing process. She has over 50 years of experience in the field and is a wealth of knowledge. When I first started working with her, I was mostly taking dictation, but as I did so, she was explaining why she used the words she did. She often stopped to think about what she wanted to say, how she wanted to say it. It was so weird to me when we had a form letter, then we totally changed the format of the form letter. It was like, how come it was good enough last year, and now it's not? More importantly, who cares? Who really reads these things that carefully? Foundations probably get so many application that they're scanning through them anyway. Why fuss so much about it?

Now, I totally understand it. People are affected by words. People are unwittingly affected by words. People who quickly scan through text are still affected by the specific words you use.

And how do I know this to be true? Because today I thought about how my heart sinks when somebody says something juuust right. I thought about how attracted I am to people with good vocabularies who know how to use them. And when I realized how very much I am swayed by saying something in one particular way, I understood that all of the struggle and difficulty of wording document juuust right is completely worth it.

Beauty is pain. I kind of hate that saying in general, but it kind of works here. If you want the most effective writing possible, you will have to pay for it. Pay with your physical energy, mental energy, and your time.

Although these blog posts are first drafts, I do edit them as I write. This post I was careful with in my wording, especially in the beginning. It takes more time and energy, but damn it, it is worth everything I put into it to make these products which make me happy.