Check the Beginning

In the writing business, few things are as important as a strong beginning. A strong beginning captures the interest of readers and moves them toward the main points of the piece. Does your beginning give people a reason to continue reading?

One way to capture reader attention comes right out of Sales 101: Indicate the benefits of reading your piece. Consider this example:

In sales parlance, this type of opening provides the “sizzle” that makes people eager to learn more. But good salesmanship describes features as well as benefits, so consider adding key features to your opening prose:

The reader now has a clear idea of the content of the piece and will be attracted to read it, knowing that it identifies problem causes and offers very specific solutions.

Look For Compelling Logic in the Middle

Having attracted your readers, you must move beyond the sizzle to the steak. Here, check to see that the paragraphs in the middle of your piece unfold in a progressive and compellingly logical way. Each should add value: to convince, to encourage action, or to simply transmit information. Any paragraph or sentence that fails to add value should be either strengthened or eliminated.

After a first pass through the middle of your piece, double-check to make sure that you’ve done all that you promised in the opening. For instance, if you were the author of the preceding example, you could ask yourself two questions: “Have I identified the root causes of customer turnover, and have I described three practical solutions as promised?” If the middle section does not deliver on all that was promised, make the necessary adjustments.

Give It a Tight Wrap-Up

Like the beginning, the ending of a written piece is one of the toughest chores. By the time they’ve said their piece, writers are usually tired of what they’re doing and want to quit. “I don’t have anything more to say about this,” is a typical remark. But a written piece without an ending is incomplete. An ending is needed to close the piece and ease readers out of it. Good endings accomplish one or more things:

• Create a sense of closure for the readers
• Reinforce the main points made in the text without rehashing their details
• Alert the readers to action steps for the future
• Urge some type of action on the part of the reader
• Create a satisfying symmetry that brings the readers back to the themes cited in the beginning

Finish off your piece with a strong ending, and you’re more likely to satisfy your readers and achieve your goal as a writer.

Forceful Style

If you are in a superior position to your readers, or if you seek to compel action, consider using a forceful style. A forceful style makes regular use of the active voice and is very direct. Here are examples of each:

Notice in these examples the bureaucratic, unassertive tone of the passive voice and indirect style.The tone of the active voice and direct style, in contrast, is more authoritative and commanding. Think about the situations in which one style or the other would be the most appropriate.

Passive Style

A passive style never goes for the jugular, and it never gives direct orders. It makes its point through suggestion. This may be perfectly appropriate in certain circumstances. So, instead of writing, “Don’t waste our time at the next meeting; come prepared,” the passive writer would write, “Greater preparation will make the time we spend in meetings more effective.” Fielden recommends this style when a person is faced with a negative situation and is writing as a subordinate to some higher authority.

Personal Style

The personal style is conversational and refers often to the writer and reader by name or through personal pronouns (e.g., I, you, we): “I like your suggestion for providing GPS systems in the delivery trucks, Jack. Let me know what it would cost to try it on a pilot basis.” It also makes heavy use of the active voice. For example, “Please bounce that same idea off Ralph and Harriet. I want to know where they stand on the matter.” A personal style is useful when the goal is to deliver good news, to congratulate, or simply to communicate with a peer, a subordinate, or another person with whom you enjoy a congenial relationship.

Impersonal Style

An impersonal style is appropriate when you’re delivering bad news, writing a technical report, or simply conveying information to a mixed group of readers (subordinates, peers, and higher-ups). The impersonal style avoids the use of individual names and personal pronouns such as me, I, we, and you. The author, in fact, disappears behind the text. Thus, impersonal writing lacks the conversational tone of the personal style.

Instead of saying, “We cannot make a decision based on the information that Bill Jones’s sales group has submitted,” the impersonal stylist would write something quite different: “The information submitted by the Western Sales Group is helpful but insufficient for decision making at the corporate level.” This may sound formal and bureaucratic, but it’s the appropriate style for the circumstances just described.

Colorful Style

Colorful writing is often appropriate when communicating with nonadversarial readers when the goal is to deliver good news, to congratulate, or to motivate. Superlatives and metaphors are often effective.

A colorful and exuberant message like this is fitting for its situation, but would be highly inappropriate in many others, for example:

Colorless Style

Some situations, like the case of the bank employee, call for distinctly uncolorful writing, in which personal pronouns, adjectives, active voice, and exuberance are limited.

Fielden notes that there is no right style for every occasion and purpose: “In business writing, style cannot be considered apart from the given situation or from the person to whom the writing is directed.”² Thus, style and situation—and the goal of your writing—should be closely linked. You know, for instance, that the style of a letter written to a friendly colleague must be much different from the style of one written to an irate customer who has threatened to sue you. Consider these examples:

In the end, the style of your communication must be dictated by how you perceive the situation, your relationship with the reader, and the goal you hope to accomplish. Here are some of these various factors:

Economy of Words

Economy of words was cited in chapter 1 as a principle of good writing. Put that principle to work as you edit your letter, e-mail, report, or other form of communication. Look for opportunities in every sentence to eliminate words that add little or no value. Likewise, if a sentence does nothing to support your message or move your argument forward, cut the entire sentence. Saying the same thing in fewer words and fewer sentences will help keep the attention of readers and add impact to your prose.

Here are typical examples of wordy sentences and how they can be tightened:

Finally, here’s a sentence that suffers badly from “business BS.” If you read it in a memo, you’d probably gag. How would you cut it down to size?

The sentence violates every criterion of good business writing. “We plan to” should be “We’re acting now.” Repeated words, such as develop and developing, or repeated meanings, such as considerable and well, are nothing more than padding. Useless modifiers such as proposed and possible weaken the impact of key nouns. “Will be needed,” a passive construction, begs the questions By whom, and when? It’s impossible to know what the writer hopes to communicate.

Even accomplished business writers find opportunities to reduce verbiage from their drafts. So, apply a sharp pencil to what you’ve written. Doing so will make your piece more readable and make its message stand out.

Use Jargon and Bureaucratic Language with Caution

While you’re trimming away at unnecessary words, take a look at the kinds of words you’re using. Are they straightforward and businesslike, or do they make you sound like a lawyer or government bureaucrat? Are your words part of the readers’ vocabulary, or are they the jargon of a small group? More important, are they appropriate ?

Jargon is not bad and may even be appropriate if the reading audience is familiar with the words and their meaning. Consider this statement:

Though chock-full of jargon, the preceding statement wouldn’t faze an audience of financial analysts and investment managers.They would understand and appreciate the use of these terms. Members of the American Association of Humanities Majors, on the other hand, would probably be mystified.

Consequently, with your audience in mind, aim for simplicity in your word selection. As a rule of thumb, use the simplest words that will communicate your message.

Sentence Structure

Make sure that each sentence has a simple, logical structure and a clearly defined subject, verb, and object. For example,“Team members [subject] will meet [verb] their QRS Corporation counterparts [object] at 2 P.M.” Some business writing is so muddy that readers cannot identify the subject or what action is being taken or requested.Very often, the best way to avoid this result is to simplify and make the sentences as direct as possible.

Notice in the following sentences how attention to sentence structure and verbiage can make prose shorter, more direct, and clearer.

In each of these examples, shorter, more direct sentences make the subject and the requested action stand out.

Sentence Length

Many writing experts say that sentences in business writing should average twelve words. Note the word average.You will be more successful in maintaining reader attention if you mix it up. A short sentence every now and then will make your writing more lively. Like this one. On the other hand, a long sentence that flows smoothly from one line to another will change the rhythm of the piece. If you put short and long sentences together effectively, then you’ll create reader-pleasing variety.

Voice

Voice indicates the relationship between a sentence’s subject and its verb. We addressed active and passive voice earlier in our discussion of appropriate style. Now we will look at how voice relates to sentence structure.

When the subject acts, the sentence has an active voice. When the subject is acted upon, the sentence is in the passive voice:

A change in voice does not alter the meaning of a sentence, but it does shift its emphasis. In the first example, the emphasis is on the actor—the editorial director. This puts the sentence in the active voice and makes the editorial director the center of interest. In the second example, the book—and not the key actor—is the center of interest; this makes it a passive sentence.

Passive sentences are not always bad or inappropriate. They are useful when the identity of the actor is not your main concern or when you’d like to conceal that identity. For example, you could write, “The book was declared out of print” if you want to play down that it was the editorial director’s decision. The classic case of concealment is “Mistakes were made.” Countless generations of bureaucrats have used this passive expression to hide the fact that they really screwed up.

Passive sentences are generally appropriate in impersonal reports and technical writing. However, they have several drawbacks. First, passive sentences generally require more words—namely, a helping verb and an extra preposition:

Second, they make sentences sound formal and ponderous. For example, the preceding active sentence is conversational; the passive version is not. Third, passive sentences conceal the actor. If you write, “Your product will be shipped,” the reader will not know who is handling the shipping. Compare this with “Our Philadelphia office will ship your product.”That information might be important to the readers. Finally, passive sentences lack vigor and assertiveness:

Most business writing benefits from active and passive sentences. The challenge for writers is to find the right balance between them. That balance is determined by the subject matter, the audience, and the writer’s goal.

Spelling and Grammatical Errors

Spelling and grammatical errors lead the list of the little nits that plague business writing. Both detract from the power of the message and the authority of the author. Spelling errors are generally the result of careless typing and are easily remedied through diligent proofreading. Grammatical errors have many origins and are more difficult to identify and fix.

SPELLING Check carefully for spelling errors.Yes, your word processor has a spell checker. But don’t rely on it to find all your mistakes; it’s not that smart. Your spell checker will, for example, judge each of these incorrectly worded sentences to be correct:

Considering these shortcomings of the spell checker, you should check every sentence carefully. When in doubt about a particular word spelling or usage, look it up in the dictionary.

AGREEMENT Since a treatise on grammar is beyond the scope of this book, here we treat only one of the more common sources of grammatical errors: agreement. A frequent source of grammatical errors, agreement refers to the correspondence between the elements of a sentence that indicate number, person, gender, or tense. For example, if a sentence has a plural subject, its verb and related words must also be plural:

Notice that auditors, they, and their are all plural words. They are in agreement. Now consider a tricker example:

Some people would have written:

What’s wrong here? Are is a plural verb and agrees with suggestions , a plural noun. Unfortunately, suggestions is not the subject. Problem is the subject—a singular word—and the verb number should agree with it.

Agreement in tense assures that action words (verbs) correspond in terms of past, present, and future. Tenses must agree both within sentences and between them. A frequent mistake of business writers is shifting incorrectly between tenses:

Misstatements of Fact

Few business writers aim to deceive their readers, but many do so when they fail to check for factual errors or misstatements. Credibility suffers when these gaffs are discovered.

Numerical errors are the easiest to make. It’s very easy to write 5 percent when you mean to write 0.5 percent or 50 percent. It’s even easier to misstate a number or percentage when it’s in a long table of large numbers. Because the writer is usually copying these numbers from a primary source, keyboard slips are easy to make.

So take the extra time to check all your figures. If you’re trying to build a case with your document, even a small error caught by readers will weaken it. They will naturally wonder, “If this part is wrong, what about the rest?”