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Good Writing
It Begins with Principles
Key Topics Covered in This Chapter
- Having a clear purpose
- Being audience focused
- Stating your key message clearly
- Staying on topic
- Observing economy of words
- Using simple sentences
- Considering your delivery strategy
EFFECTIVE business writing rests on a foundation of developed over the centuries. In this chapter, we explore these principles. Master them, and you’ll know how to handle the many different writing tasks that come your way: memos, e-mails, letters, reports, and so forth.
Have a Clear Purpose
Literary writing expresses the writer’s feelings. Business writing, on the other hand, is utilitarian, aiming to serve any one of many purposes. Here are just a few purposes of business writing:
- To explain or justify actions already taken: “Given that situation, we have determined that the best course of action is to reject all current bids and to seek others.”
- To convey information, as in a research report or the promulgation of a new company policy: “Management wants all employees to know that the floggings will stop as soon as we have evidence of improved morale.”
- To influence the reader to take some action: “I hope that you will find that our new, Web-based cash management services can reduce your working capital requirements and save you money.”
- To deliver good or bad news: “Unfortunately, the engine fire you reported occurred one day after the expiration of the warranty period.”
- To direct action: “Your team should complete and deliver the product specifications by May 1.”
So the first thing you should ask yourself is, “What is my reason for writing this document? What do I aim to accomplish?” Keep that purpose uppermost in your mind as you begin writing, and you will be observing the first principle of business writing. Jot the purpose down at the beginning of your draft as a reminder, and refer back to it as you proceed. Doing so will help you stay on course and assure that your writing serves its stated purpose.
And once you’ve finished your draft, ask yourself, “Has this document fulfilled my stated purpose?” Many writers, in attending to the mundane tasks of preparing a document, lose track of their purpose for writing. Don’t make that mistake.
Be Audience Focused
Just about every businessperson understands the critical importance of being customer focused. The customer is, after all, the source of the economic value sought by the organization—a value that can only be extracted if the customer perceives value in what the organization has to offer. Being customer focused means understanding customer preferences and attitudes, how customers perceive value, how they want to be served, and their hot buttons (i.e., what really gets their attention).
There’s a clear analogy between the business principle of customer focus and the writing principle of audience focus. Just as a company won’t connect with its customers if it fails to understand them, their needs, and how they prefer to be served, you won’t connect with your readers if you don’t understand them, their needs, and how they prefer to receive information. Will your readers be receptive, indifferent, or resistant to your message? Do they already know a little or a lot about the subject? How much technical information can these readers digest? What are their styles of processing information, and how can you match these styles? That is, do these readers need visual content, or will words suffice? Since reading your document will require their time and attention, what’s in it for them?
Case Study: Applying the Audience-Focus Principle
Herb is the product manager for a line of consumer electronic products. With a new gizmo in the early stages of development, Herb knows that it’s now time to bring the R&D, marketing, and manufacturing people together. Their collaboration is the company’s best assurance that the new product will (1) meet customer requirements and (2) be designed in such a way that the manufacturing division will be able to build them efficiently.
Herb determines that he should write a memo as the first step in building collaboration between the three different groups. Here are some audience issues Herb should consider before he composes the memo:
- His relationship with the readers: Since the readers—personnel in marketing, R&D, and manufacturing—do not work directly for Herb, he has no authority over them. A few actually outrank Herb. Given these facts, Herb cannot command or direct his readers; he must elicit their collaboration through persuasion.
- Different information processing styles: Herb knows that the marketing people are highly verbal and intuitive, whereas most of the R&D and manufacturing people are engineers; they are less verbal and respond better to data and analysis. He must craft his message with this knowledge in mind.
- What they already know: Each member of Herb’s audience is familiar with the new gizmo under development, its technical features, and the target market. Consequently, Herb will not have to explain these aspects. But the broader marketing and manufacturing issues have not been resolved.
- Divergent interests: Even though all three groups depend on the effectiveness of the corporation for their well-being, each of the three functions—R&D, marketing, and manufacturing—tends to fixate on its own immediate issues. Thus, Herb must communicate in a way that will satisfy these very different parties.
Here’s the memo that he wrote:
July 14, 2002
To: Carl Jones, Emma Smith, Roland Carrero, Justine Roussel, Lynn Ravenscroft
From: Herb Bacon
Subject: Time for Gizmo 5 cross-functional planning
As you know, design specs for the Gizmo 5 electronic garlic press are moving forward within R&D. That means that it’s time to begin planning for the new product’s marketing and manufacturing. Early cross-function planning helped make the Gizmo 4 a tremendous success, and I know that we are all eager to repeat the experience. Great things happen when we put our heads together to focus on a problem. Agenda items will include (1) user benefits and (2) product specs and manufacturability.
I would like to schedule an initial meeting for noon, Monday, August 5, in our small conference room. Lunch will be provided. Does that work for you?
Herb
Notice how Herb does not command or direct his readers, but tactfully elicits their collaboration by giving a clear reason for the meeting—and for his memo. Note too that he suggests benefits for all the readers—marketing, R&D, and manufacturing.
State Your Key Message Clearly
The key message is what you want readers to remember. In contemporary business-speak, it’s the so-called take-away. That message should be clear and compact—just a sentence or two for the typical business communiqué. Most communication experts say that if you cannot get the message down to that length, you probably are not clear about what you want to say. The sooner you can isolate the key message into one or two sentences, the easier it will be to write the entire document.
If you experience difficulty in isolating a clear and compact key message, the reason may be that you’re struggling to cover two unrelated messages in the same document. In this case, write two separate documents. Stick to one topic per document, and your writing will have more impact.
In most cases, your key message should be stated at or near the very beginning, with the rest of the piece used to flesh out the details or to provide supporting evidence. Doing so assures that skimmers will pick it up. They may or may not want to probe deeper.
Isolating the key message is especially challenging when a committee is involved. A committee generally has members with different viewpoints, and each person often insists on having his or her view represented in a document, inadvertently weakening the focus.
The case study underscores the challenge of writing on behalf of committees. The best antidote is to educate committee members on the importance of drafting focused documents with single themes. When more than one message needs to be communicated, encourage the committee to use more than one document.
Stay on Topic
Many attribute Bill Clinton’s victory over George Herbert Walker Bush in the U.S. presidential election of 1992 to Clinton’s strategy of continually hammering his opponent on the weak state of the economy. For Clinton, staying on message didn’t come naturally. He was capable of expounding on policy issues from A to Z, and enjoyed doing so. This is why his political strategist, James Carville, was always there to remind him of the catchphrase, “It’s the economy, stupid!”
Case Study: Too Many Cooks . . .
Edna was an active volunteer in a nonprofit organization whose goal was to revitalize the downtown of her community. Her team had just completed a detailed survey of downtown shoppers, workers, and visitors, and the organization’s board had asked her to draft a press release about its findings. Those findings pointed to substantial dissatisfaction with the quality and variety of the town’s retail base, which focused almost exclusively on summer tourists to the exclusion of year-round residents and downtown workers.
Edna drafted a press release and submitted it to the board for approval. Its key message was “The survey has identified a serious mismatch between current retail offerings and the express needs of the downtown population.”This message made sense to Edna and to everyone else who had analyzed the survey data. But some board members had other ideas. “I think that it projects a negative image,” the director of the Chamber of Commerce complained. “We should also say something about the things that people like about our stores.”
“Yes,” agreed the director of the organization. “And we need to tell readers about all the things we’re doing to make things better—our calendar of outdoor events, our merchandising seminars, and so forth. Otherwise, people will think that we aren’t doing anything.”
Seeing an opportunity, two other board members chimed in with their ideas. By the end of the meeting, the board had given Edna a list of three topics—in addition to the survey results—that it wanted her to include in the press release. But to include these other topics would mean diluting the strong, clear message that Edna had originally crafted.
Carville sensed that the economy was the issue of greatest concern to voters that year and that Clinton’s verbal forays into foreign policy, military spending, school lunch programs, and other issues would dissipate his effectiveness and appeal. Consequently, he urged the candidate to keep hammering away on this important issue.
For a writer, staying on message means maintaining a solid connection to the key message. In practical terms this means steering clear of unrelated or loosely related subjects that just happen to be on your mind. It means not slathering on a pile of data and details that obscure the bottom-line message. Supporting data is often necessary, especially when your goal is to convey information or to convince readers. But supporting data should always be linked to the message.
Observe Economy of Words
If you’re like most of us, your high school and college instructors periodically required essays or reports of some minimum length. “Give me an essay on the women’s suffrage movement by the end of next week—no less than a thousand words,” they would tell you, or something to that effect. Though well meaning, the assignments had an unintended consequence: We learned how to take the four hundred words of solid information we had and combine them with six hundred words of blather to reach the assigned word count. Consider this example:
The mass movement for women’s suffrage in the United States of America—that is, the campaign to give U. S. citizens of the female gender the right to go to the polls and vote for the candidates of their choice in any given election like everybody else—was of monumental importance in the history of the United States of America. It was stupendous in its consequences and scope, involved thousands upon thousands of people—women, men, and others—and its outcome affects how we live, work, and participate in the political process to this very day.
Sentences like these would advance a student 8 percent of the way toward the thousand-word goal without their saying anything in particular.
In the business world, there are no minimum lengths for written communiqués. In fact, shorter is always better if it communicates the required information. Business writers are advised to heed rule 17 in Strunk and White’s timeless The Elements of Style, which advises the writer to omit needless words: “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”1
This quote from Strunk and White is itself a perfect model of their rule.They use no unnecessary words; every word makes a contribution.
Economy of words has two big benefits:Your key message stands out, and it saves your readers valuable time.
Use Simple Sentences
The sentence is the basic unit of written expression. Most sentences make a statement. The statement can be simple or complex:
- Joan wrote.
- Joan wrote a letter.
- Joan wrote an apologetic letter.
- At her boss’s suggestion, Joan wrote an apologetic letter.
- At her boss’s suggestion, Joan wrote an apologetic letter to the disgruntled customers.
- At her boss’s suggestion, Joan wrote an apologetic letter to the five disgruntled customers who threatened to sue.
- At her boss’s suggestion, and with the help of corporate counsel, Joan wrote an apologetic letter to the five disgruntled customers who threatened to sue.
- At her boss’s suggestion, and with the help of corporate counsel, Joan wrote an apologetic letter to the five disgruntled customers who threatened to sue; each was urged to return his purchase for a full refund.
This process of sentence “complexification” could go on and on. Sentences are made more complex (and impart more information) as we add objects (“a letter”), clauses (“At her boss’s urging”), adjectives (“disgruntled”), and create compound sentences (“each was urged . . .”). Packing more information into each sentence is not necessarily bad. Nor does it violate rules of grammar if done properly. However, complexity contains two potential problems. First, complex sentences make the reader work harder. Second, complexity may confuse.
As a writer, your challenge is to know when a sentence has reached its optimal carrying capacity. Here, knowledge of the audience is a useful guide. In the preceding example sentences, do the readers need to know that Joan’s boss suggested the letter? Or that corporate counsel was brought in? Is the fact that there were five disgruntled customers relevant? If these bits of information are not necessary, consider eliminating them. If they are necessary, you may use any of the sentences in their current states of complexity or, to make the message easier to swallow, break it into several, less complex sentences.
Both literary writing and business writing in the United States have undergone a gradual evolution from complex to simpler sentences. Consider the two following examples. The first is from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, published in the 1850s; the second is the last line in Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 work, For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes, that have passed within.2
He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.3
Hawthorne’s sentence is long, complex in structure, and elegant in word usage. Hemingway’s, in contrast, is simple and spare—no doubt the product of his early newspaper career. A sharp-penciled newsroom editor probably taught young Hemingway to drop the flowery phrases and three-line sentences and to concentrate on putting his information into tight, little packages. You should follow Hemingway’s lead with your business writing.
Consider Your Delivery Strategy
Our final principle concerns authorship, timing, and format. Your message will have more impact if it comes from the right person, at the right time, and in the right format.
Authorship
Before you begin writing, consider from whom the communication should come. Should it come from you? Your boss? The entire team? The choice is bound to make a difference in reader impact.
Consider the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson is credited with drafting the declaration that formally separated the North American colonies from Great Britain. But the paper included the signatures of representatives from each of the colonies. A document written and signed by Jefferson alone would have been well received in his native Virginia, but poorly received elsewhere. Those added signatures indicated agreement among the colony’s leaders and assured that the document would have widespread credibility.
Timing
Make sure that you are not writing your document too early or too late. If you write too early, people won’t be ready to focus on the issue you’re raising. If you wait too long, you’ll lose the opportunity to influence the outcome.
Consider the case of Lloyd, a management consultant whose forthcoming book, The Ten Secrets of Customer Service, was scheduled for publication in September 2002. Eager to create buzz about his book, Lloyd drafted a two-thousand-word article on the ten secrets and submitted it to a popular business magazine. Unfortunately, the magazine published the article in June 2002, four months too early to serve Lloyd’s purpose. By the time his book was published, the buzz had faded.
Format
The format of your writing will also affect its impact on readers. Should it be a formal letter, a memo, or an e-mail? And as long as you’re considering the format issue, would a verbal presentation of your message be more effective? The best format for a message is determined by issues we’ve already discussed: the writer’s purpose, the intended audience, and the information the writer is trying to convey. Consider the following case.
Case Study: Form Often Is Function
Helen’s staff had just finished a research study on how customers perceive the quality of her company’s products and customer service.The findings of the study, its methodology, and supporting data were currently collected in a seventy-page binder. Helen was wondering how best to transmit this information. She knew that some people would want to learn all the details of customer perceptions. Others would want to know how she arrived at her findings—that is, they would want to know her methodology. Some would simply want the bottom line of customer perceptions. And still others—number crunchers in the accounts payable department, for example—would not be the least bit interested. She could hand out copies of the binder, but that format would be inappropriate for many people.
Let’s consider two of Helen’s options. She could send a memo or an e-mail with a summary of her findings, or she could send the same summary by memo or e-mail, but with this postscript: “The complete study, and a description of its methodology, is available. Call extension 456 to obtain a copy.”
This second option would seem to solve her problem but, like the first, is a passive option. People could easily ignore Helen’s communication. And since it’s in written form, it is also a one-way communication. One-way communication is useful for disseminating simple forms of information (e.g., “The cafeteria will be closed at 2 P.M. tomorrow to accommodate the remodeling program”), but complex information generally has higher impact and imparts greater value if presented verbally and surrounded by dialogue. Thus, Helen might consider this three-pronged alternative:
- Communicate a written summary of findings by memo or e-mail.
- Invite anyone interested in the methodology or other details to obtain the full seventy-page report.
- Invite management and other key parties to a stand-up presentation of the study’s findings.This presentation and dialogue between the attendees would enhance the impact of Helen’s study on the right people and create further dialogue.
Thus, the ideal format for your communications requires plenty of thought. Even if you stick to a written format, you must consider how best to format and distribute it to obtain the greatest impact. And you need to think about supplementing a written format with other approaches.
Summing Up
This chapter has examined the principles on which good writing is based. These principles apply to all forms of written communication : memos, letters, reports, and so forth. And as you can probably see, most of these principles apply to nonwritten communication as well. In a nutshell, the principles are these:
- Have a clear purpose. Business writing can serve many purposes. Never begin writing before you’ve established in your own mind the purpose for which you are communicating and what you hope to accomplish.
- Be audience focused. Communication—in any form—won’t do its job if it fails to consider the needs, attitudes, and information preferences of the intended audience. Be attuned to these audience characteristics as you write, and your message will have greater impact.
- State your key message clearly. Always think about the message you’d like your audience to take away.The message should be clear and compact. For most business writing, this means just a sentence or two.
- Stay on topic. Your key message is your main connection to the audience. For any single piece of writing, you are usually better off sticking with your key point and not getting into other issues. Switching to other topics risks a break in the audience connection.
- Observe economy of words. Every word should make a contribution. Unnecessary words are like wisps of fog that obscure what you are trying to say. Clear them away, and your key message will stand out.
- Use simple sentences. Sentences are your basic units of expression. Keep them short and uncomplicated, and your readers will have an easier time catching your message.
- Consider your delivery strategy. Delivery strategy is about authorship, timing, and format. In terms of impact and what you hope to accomplish, are you the right person to be delivering the message, or should it be someone else? Have you chosen the best time to deliver it? And is the written word the best format? Would a phone call or a stand-up presentation be more effective?