any of us tend to worry excessively about how our publications look and worry insufficiently about what our publications say. Unless our copy says something worth reading, it really doesn't matter how good it looks.
	A pig with lipstick is still a pig

There are at least three components to insuring that your copy and content is worth reading:

• your copy should say what you want it to say
• your copy should say what you want effectively
• your copy should look good, that is, it must be readable and legible.

Say What You Want to Say

One way to make sure that what you say is what you want to say is to spend a fair amount of time thinking about who it is that you are talking to.

By careful attention to your target audience, your copy will become more centered not on how good your product is, but rather, why your target audience needs your product. The second approach is clearly more effective.

Say It Well

Saying it well means using the right words in the right order with the right punctuation.

We normally find that the process of saying something well involves two steps for us.

• First, we say it out loud.
• Second, we write what we say in Windows Notepad.

Why do we speak our thoughts out loud first? It just seems that most of us unconsciously speak more naturally than we write. When we speak we tend to adjust and modify our words and phrasing to the person we are talking to. And, on the contrary, when we write, we tend to add fancy words and flowery expressions.

Why Notepad? Notepad has no formatting, no bold, no underline, no color; we are forced to chose the right words and put those words in the right order. We have discussed the importance of this elsewhere. Writing in Notepad removes the temptation to add emphasis by bolding, underlining, capital letters; what remains when you write in Notepad is pure, clear, unformatted text. (Since most of us rely on others to proofread for us - and if we don't, we should - the quality of proofreading is enhanced when the proofreader is not distracted by formatting.)

In short, if you feel the need to emphasise your text with bold, all caps, or multiple exclamation points, stop. Go back. Re-write. If you feel that you need to add formatting for emphasis, that almost always means that your wording is awkward or you have chosen the wrong word.

Finally, we generally then move our copy into Corel WordPerfect. WordPerfect is excellent for two reasons:

• WordPerfect's spelling, grammar checker and thesaurus are the best available
• WordPerfect will not add formatting that will only have to be removed when you finalize your writing in the page layout program.

Make It Look Good

Now, take your copy to a page layout program and make it look good. Remember the guidelines for page layout we have provided elsewhere.

Which page layout program should you use? There are a lot of them, and some of them are:

Adobe InDesign
Quark XPress
Corel Ventura
Adobe PageMaker
Adobe FrameMaker
Deneba Canvas.

However, there are much less expensive and more user-friendly programs that you can use. As most of our publications are only a few pages, we prefer the precision and ease of Corel Draw. In fact, we use Draw for about 95% of our layouts. You may find that Adobe Illustrator works well for you and it is rather similar to Draw.
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