7 Top Writing Tips for 2025

Friends! I started the New Year with a vision board workshop. (There’s something so soothing about cutting and pasting IRL.) There, our delightful leader recommended that we call our masterpieces DECISION boards, not vision boards.

In the spirit of manifesting a delightful and successful 2025, here are seven decisions to make for your writing practice this year:

1. Favor HI (human intelligence) over AI.

At this point in its evolution, AI has proven itself to be a great assistant, but a lousy writer. So use AI to help you get your writing job done. Send it to fetch stats for a lead. Ask it to write a dozen draft captions. Invite it to help you brainstorm story angles.

But for messages that stand out, don’t use AI to craft your message. Bring your own humanity to your writing. Let your own, personal, human voice shine through. Tell human-interest stories. Lead with a personal anecdote.

2. Pass the Palm Test.

People will read more of your message if it looks easier to read. So pass the Palm Test: Make it look easier to read by breaking your message into chunks no longer than or wider than the palm of your hand. (Not your whole hand! Your palm!)

When you’re finished, I should be able to put the palm of my hand down anywhere on your message. There should be something — a subhead, a list, a link, bold-faced lead-ins, highlight key words — other than just plain paragraphs under my hand.

3. Start strong.

Stop writing who-what-when-where-why-and-how leads. Quit boring your readers with XYZ Company yesterday announced that …

Instead, write leads that are:

• Concrete: Show instead of tell.
• Creative: Steal a technique from fiction writers, like storytelling or metaphor.
• Provocative: Provoke a question in the readers’ minds that they can only answer by reading the rest of the piece.

You only have one chance to draw readers into your message. If you don’t grab them in the lead, you’ll lose them forever.

4. Build a bridge, not a wall.

Speaking of leads, make yours short.

“‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,’” writes John McIntyre, copy desk chief, Baltimore Sun.

“The creation of the universe has a 10-word lead! So why do you need 40 words to say that your chief accountant has just completed the necessary certification? The answer, of course, is you don’t.”

Keep your lead to 25 words or less. Build a bridge into your article; don’t erect a wall that readers have to crawl over to get into your message.

5. Master the feature-style story structure.

A few years ago, Groove HQ ran an A/B test on a blog post. The B version increased reading by 520% and readers by 300%/

The difference? The A version featured a traditional news lead; the B version, a feature lead.

This is just one data point in a ream of research that shows again and again that readers prefer feature structure. Make 2025 the year you master the feature-style story form.

6. Break it up.

If you break writing up into three steps, research says, you’ll write better, easier and faster. So:

1. Prewrite: Get ready to write. Do your research, determine your theme, organize your message.
2. Write: Sit down at the keyboard and feel the words flowing out of your fingertips.
3. Rewrite: Dot the I’s and cross the T’s and hit your readability numbers.

Take a break between each of these steps, and you’ll soon be writing better, easier and faster — and enjoying the process more.

7. Stop We-we-ing on your readers.

Readers care about themselves; not about your organization and its products, programs, plans and policies.

So stop it with the institutional narcissism! To reach readers, find a story angle that shows how your products, programs, plans and policies affect the reader. Write you, not we.

Happy New Year!

Here’s wishing you a joy-filled and successful 2025. May this be the year that you draw more readers in and move them to act!

Ann Wylie works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Don’t miss a single tip: Sign up for Ann’s email newsletter here. Check out Ann’s recent PRsay post, 4 Writing Mistakes You’re (Probably!) Making Now.

Copyright © 2025 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.

Photo credit: JD8

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