Acknowledgements
Having grown up in a multicultural and multilingual environment, language has always been the best way for me to make sense of myself and the world. I love the raw power, elegance and versatility of language, and not a day goes by in which I don’t play or work with words. Looking back, it seems only natural that my passion has become my profession.
To me, writing is a natural process that is inherently intuitive. I visualise, go by my gut feeling and listen to the sonic quality of language. With these resources at my disposal - and a decade of professional writing experience - the writing sometimes seems to happen by itself. But my way of working has an underlying structure that, I realised, I could try to teach others.
This book was born of the desire to identify that underlying structure. While this seemed like a pretty straightforward task, I have to confess it has been frustrating and challenging. I am sure, that like me, you will appreciate the irony of a professional writer having difficulty writing about his writing.
Luckily for me, I found friends, relatives and clients willing to help me see this project through. They challenged my ideas and gave me constructive feedback on anything from style to structure.
For this, I want to express deep gratitude to
- Julia Balandina at American International Group
- Lindsay Bogaard at Bogaard Arena
- Thijs Westerkamp, Ronald Meijers and Steffi Gande at Krauthammer International
- Heidi Does at TNT Logistics
- Annedien Hoen at Annedienhoen.nl
- Lucy Lambriex at Lab Lambriex
- Cindy van Roon at Lexbridge
- Branka van Roon at The Excellent Leadership Company
- Marjolijn Dijksterhuis at Mea
- Tari Habbitt and Dennis Larsen at ReputationInc
- Iben Molenkamp
Special thanks goes out to Rob Leenders and his team at Made of Man, who used their talents to design a compelling visual counterpart to the print and PDF version of my book.