Defining your goal

Your first priority is to know exactly what you want to happen when the person you’re writing to reads what you’ve written. Determining this is far less obvious than it sounds.

Consider a cover letter for your résumé. If you see it as a formal but unimportant necessity toward your ultimate goal — to get a job — a cover letter can just say:

Dear Mr. Blank, Here is my résumé. —Jack Slade

Intuitively you probably know that this isn’t sufficient. But analyze what you want to accomplish and you can see clearly why it falls short. Your cover letter must:

• Connect you with the recipient so that you become a person instead of another set of documents.
• Set up the person to review your qualifications with a favorable mindset.
• Persuade the recipient that your résumé is worth reading.
• Show that you understand the job and the company.
• Make you stand out from the competition in a meaningful way.

You also need the cover letter to demonstrate your personal qualifications, especially the ability to communicate well. If you see that accomplishing your big goal, getting a shot at the job or contract, depends on this set of more specific goals, it’s obvious why a one-line perfunctory message won’t help you compete. Seen properly, a cover letter is in fact very important.

A cover letter for a formal business proposal has its own big goal: help convince an individual or an organization to finance your new product, for example. To do this, the cover letter’s role is to connect with prospective buyers, entice them to actually read at least part of the document, predispose them to like what they see, present your company as better than the competition and show off good communication skills.

How about the proposal itself? If you break down this goal into a more specific subset, you realize the proposal must ideally demonstrate:

• The financial viability of what you plan to produce
• A minimal investment risk and high profit potential
• Your own excellent qualifications and track record
• Outstanding backup by an experienced team
• Special expertise in the field
• In-depth knowledge of the marketplace, competition, business environment and so on

Spelling out your goals is extremely useful because the process keeps you aligned with the big picture while giving you instant guidelines for effective content. Because of good planning on the front end, you’re already moving toward how to accomplish what you want.

To reap the benefit of goal definition, you must take time to look past the surface. Write every message with a clear set of goals. If you don’t know your goals, don’t write at all.

Try This: Invent your persona. Invariably one of your goals is to present yourself in writing as confident, professional, competent, knowledgeable, creative, resourceful, empathetic, generous, good-natured and so on, but don’t let me tell you who you are or want to be! Create a list of the personal and professional qualities you want other people to perceive in you. Then remember, every time you write, be that person. This doesn’t mean faking it — rather, it means acting as your best self. Ask yourself how that individual handles the tough stuff. Your answers may amaze you. This technique isn’t mystical. It’s a way of accessing your own knowledge base and intuition. You will find yourself channeling this winning persona into your face-to-face experiences, too.

Defining your audience

You’ve no doubt noticed that people are genuinely different in countless ways: what they value, their motivations, how they like to spend their time, their attitude toward work and success, how they communicate and make decisions, and much more. One ramification of these variables is that they read and react to your messages in different ways than you expect.

As part of your planning you need to anticipate people’s reactions to both your content and writing style. The key to successfully predicting your reader’s response is to target everything you write to someone specific, rather than an anonymous, faceless “anyone.”

When you meet someone in person and want to persuade that individual to your viewpoint, you automatically adapt to that person’s reactions as you go along. You respond to a host of clues. Beyond interruptions, comments and questions, you also perceive facial expression, body language, tone of voice, gestures, nervous mannerisms and many other indicators. A written message lacks all in-person clues, although Internet writing has developed some ways to convey feelings, like inventive punctuation and emoji. But such devices are not appropriate to all media and purposes. For your message to connect, you must play both roles — the reader’s and your own. Fortunately, doing this isn’t as hard as it may sound.

Unless your message is trivial, begin by creating a written profile or (portrait, if you prefer) of the person you’re writing to. There’s a really big payoff in doing this for people who are important to you, such as your boss or a major client. It gives you illuminating guidelines on how to improve all your interactions with that person, and clues for what to say and how to say it. You can consciously draw on this knowledge every time you write. This helps improve your face-to-face interactions as well.

When the situation involves someone you don’t deal with often, or don’t know at all, the depth of the profile you create depends on how important the results are to you. If you’re responding to a customer query, you don’t need to know the customer’s decision-making style. If you’re writing to the department head with a request, you might want to find out how much information this person prefers to have and what their budget and priorities are.

Before you try to build a portrait, it might seem daunting to characterize someone when so much that drives each person is invisible. Trust me, you know much more about other people than you think. In the case of someone already familiar to you, your observations, experience and intuition go a long way. It’s a matter of drawing on these resources in a systematic manner, especially your memory of how they reacted to previous interactions.

Try This: Build a profile. Suppose the person is someone you know. Begin with the usual suspects: demographics. Write down what you already know about the person or take your best guess. Factors such as which generation someone belongs to and their education level may be relevant. Other factors that marketers call demographics may also matter. These include values and beliefs, attitudes, opinions, interests and leisure and volunteer activities.

But almost always, your most valuable insights relate to peoples’ professional style, especially, their ways of interacting. Thinking analytically about factors that may directly affect how your message is perceived include:

• Professional background and experience
• Positioning in the organization: What level? Degree of authority? Moving up or down? Respected? Influential? How ambitious? Happy in the job and with the organization?
• Leadership style: Top down? Team-based? Collaborative? Indiscernible?
• Preferred communication style: In-person? Brief, or detailed, written messages? Telephone? Texting? PowerPoint? Social media?
• Approach to decision-making: Collaborative or top-down? Spontaneous or deliberative? Risk-taker or play-it-safer?
• Information preferences: Broad vision? In depth? Visuals?
• Work priorities and pressures
• Sensitivities and hot buttons: What makes your VIP angry? Happy?
• Interaction style and preferences: A people person or a numbers, systems or technology person? Good team member or not?
• Type of thinking: Logical or intuitive? Statistics-based or ideas-based? Big picture or micro-oriented? Looking for long-range or immediate results?
• Weaknesses (perceived by that person or not): Lack of tech savvy? Poor people skills? Lack of education and training? Light on experience? Inflexibility?
• Type of people the person likes, feels comfortable with, trusts and respects, and the reverse. Who likes and gets along with this person?
• Sense of humor, personal passions, hobbies

Do you know, or can you figure out, what your readers worry about? What keeps them up at night? Their biggest problems? When you know a person’s concerns, you can create more compelling messages. If you’re pitching something, this is essential. I am not suggesting your aim should be manipulative. Taking the trouble to think within another person’s framework is respectful. Wouldn’t you rather be addressed in a way that acknowledges what matters to you most when you need to make a decision, for example?

And of course, your own relationship to the person matters, as well as your relative positioning and the degree of mutual liking, respect and trust — the simpatico factor. Notice that considering some of the points in the previous list might actually help you connect better with someone — recognizing who does well with the person, for example. I’ve seen clever colleagues ask a favored person how they get along so well with the supervisor and use the ideas productively. But for many of the points, your own experience serves to keep you away from the hot buttons and keep your request in a positive light — this works best when you systematize what you know with a portrait.

I’m sure you’re wondering how you can possibly take so much into consideration, or why you would want to. The good news: When your message is truly simple, you usually don’t. More good news: Even when your goal is complex or important, only some factors matter. I’m giving you a lengthy list to draw on because every situation brings different characteristics into play. Thinking through which ones count in your specific situation is crucial and rarely hard.

For example, say you want authorization to produce a video explaining your department’s work to show at an employee event. If the boss likes the video idea, you might need to prove that you will make a good one. If not, you can appeal to other preferences. For example, perhaps this person values relationships and wants to cultivate high morale. This boss would probably welcome a way to show staff members they are valued. Or the boss may be a person who likes innovation and being first in the neighborhood. To gain approval, frame the story according to the specific decision-maker. I’m not saying you should distort the facts or omit any: The story you tell must be true and fair. But the focus and emphasis can be adapted.

Notice that the same factors matter if you’re an independent contractor pitching a project, but you may lack the advantage of knowing the decision-maker well.

You succeed when you take the time to look at things through another person’s eyes rather than solely your own. Doing so doesn’t compromise your principles. It shows that you’re sensible and sensitive to the differences between people and promotes your relationships. It tells you how to frame what you’re asking for.

Here’s a technique drawn from psychology that lets you leapfrog into the mind of someone you know, even if not well, with less conscious analysis. Close your eyes and imagine the person as vividly as you can — if your boss is a woman, for example, see how she sits behind her desk, her posture, what she’s wearing, how she looks at you, her expression and gestures. Hear her voice. Observe her environment — what’s on the walls, on her desk and so on. Hold that detailed image in your mind and draft your message.

You will probably find yourself naturally thinking with the right tone and language, with a good feel for what to say. This visualization technique works because it draws on your intuition and observation. It is almost like having a live interaction with the person. In fact, you can take this one step further and imagine the conversation. Explain what you want and hear how the person responds. Then react to that, back and forth.

An imagined conversation like this can tell you what objections someone is likely to voice. You can then build the answers into your written message so it is much more persuasive. The approach is also valuable when you prepare for a tough confrontation, advocate for something, make a sales pitch and many more situations.

The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 has impacted nearly everyone’s role in the economy, diminishing entire industries and demanding adaptations few were ready for. In some ways the pandemic helped to flatten generational differences in the use of communication tools. People of every age suddenly needed to master videoconferencing and depend on online networks and resources to far greater extent.

This flattening has been seen in other trends as well. Twitter has become the prime vehicle for political announcements and high-impact exchanges internationally, used by CEOs and presidents alike to reach constituents without “middlemen” like the press. Expressing yourself in this medium takes good writing and editing! The price of reaching such massive audiences unfiltered can be astronomical.

Brainstorming the best content for your purpose

Perhaps defining your goal and audience so thoroughly sounds like unnecessary busywork. But doing so helps immeasurably when you’re approaching people with an idea, product or service that you want them to buy into.

Earlier in this chapter I talk about how to ask for something for yourself — in that case, a plum assignment at work. Here I move into how to think through a request on an employer’s behalf.

Suppose you work for a nonprofit organization whose mission is to save elephants from poaching. A major new project is planned. You’re asked to draft a letter to Mr. T, a one-time major benefactor who has not donated to SaveEl in two years, though he’s known to have funded several other animal rights nonprofits in that time frame. What do you know, or can find out, about Mr. T?

Let’s say you know he is:

• 65 years old
• Retired founder of a successful software development company
• Champion of animal-related causes
• Concerned about African conservation
• Made the biggest donation for an orphanage for baby elephants without mothers
• Likes his good deeds to be widely appreciated

This is pretty generic but enough to ask and answer the key question: What is your goal and how can you achieve it? Your first thought is to write a letter to secure a donation. This requires you to

• Reignite his interest in SaveEl.
• Engage him with the specific project.
• Set the future stage for a more positive orientation to SaveEl. Should this funding plea not work, it might help achieve a better reception next time.

Now stand back and think for a minute about your main goal and the appropriate communication channel. Can you envision writing a letter that will accomplish so much? It’s quite unlikely that you can elicit a return message with a big check attached. A substantial donation is a different “ask” than one requesting readers to pitch in $25, which is more of an impulse buy.

Charities, universities and cultural organizations know that “cultivating” big donors is an in-person, relationship-building process that takes time, often years. You don’t need any special knowledge to realize that given many choices of where to invest their charitable funding, decision-makers need to feel trust, alignment with the cause and confidence in the organization’s ability to deliver what they hope for.

Looking at it this way, a realistic goal for your letter to Mr. T is to secure a meeting, very much like the goal of a cover letter and/or résumé is to earn you an interview. And just as with a job application, this shifts your goals to become more achievable. The main goal of your letter can be restated as:

• Open the door: Interest Mr. T enough so he wants to learn more and is amenable to a one-on-one conversation, ideally in person.

This scenario demonstrates an important marketing principle that applies to many situations: A successful outcome results from combining many elements and demands comprehensive planning. Often you need to orchestrate a sequence of events or steps — in marketing terms, this is the customer journey.

Now that you’ve narrowed your goal for the letter and know who Mr. T is, at least superficially, you are ready to consider content points. Some possibilities:

• Appreciation for past support (always say thank you, thank you, thank you!)
• Rundown on what SaveEl has accomplished for the mission lately and in particular, with the elephant orphanage
• Statistics on the number of elephants nevertheless lost in this recent time frame
• Inspiring description of the project goal as helping elephant babies from being orphaned at all
• Interesting project details:
  • How it will work, very briefly
  • Expected accomplishments, with stats
  • Use of innovative high-tech methods
• Expectation that this high-profile project will draw wide media attention

And finally, the ask: May I (or a higher-up) meet with you and tell you more?

Here are the important takeaways from this example:

• Know your goals clearly and know your audience. A portrait-in-words guides you in brainstorming the points that help win your case with that person. Once you have a list, it’s easy to winnow through the points, find the lead and organize the rest. This gives you a content blueprint.

  Profiling your reader works equally well when you’re writing a business request for funding; a major proposal; or business plan, a report, a client letter, a marketing piece, a blog, a presentation, a networking message or website copy. Know your goal. Know who your intended audience is and what that person or group cares about. Then think inside that perspective.

• Know your medium and what it can realistically accomplish. Analyzing your goal and audience helps you figure out what communication channel will work best for the message at hand. If you want to achieve more than it can reasonably deliver, look for another channel or shift the nature of your request. Consider the medium’s limitations, too. The letter to Mr. T can’t be so long that it loses his attention. If a proposal is in order down the line, financials and other details are covered there.
• Know that good communication is often a multi-step process. Similar to my example of asking for a donation, when you want a raise, a promotion, a new computer or an important favor, your best approach is in-person. Then the role of a written message is to pave the way for a meeting where you can make your pitch. You need to say just enough to justify the conversation. This may lead to a proposal. It’s exactly the same for a salesman who is pitching a product or service. And it’s the same principle you apply when you tweet to draw readers to your blog and use the blog to pull them to your website and then interest them solidly so they move to the “buy” page. Thinking through these stages puts you way ahead.

• Recognize that virtually everything you write is “an ask.” When you send a message or document, you automatically ask your recipients to read it. You then implicitly ask them to react or respond in some way, whether it’s just to retain information about something or take an action. An event invitation asks the recipient to feel motivated to participate. A “congratulations on your promotion” note asks the lucky person to notice that you’re on their side. A cover note asks the reader to pay attention to what’s attached.

  Try to think of a written communication that doesn’t ask for something. It’s pretty tough. There’s an advantage to seeing every message as a request: Doing so sets you up to frame your message with the right content and tone for the person you’re writing to.

• Personalize everything you write. You automatically do this when you message a friend you know is on your wavelength. But don’t assume everyone else shares that wavelength! Way beyond the generic descriptions like common generational differences, people are individuals. If you want people to care about your message, know what they care about and think inside that perspective.
• Remember that good writing demands good information. When you write based on the process I explain, expect to find gaps in your own knowledge or understanding. When the result matters to you, fill those gaps! The letter writer can research Mr. T on the Internet to uncover additional relevant factors about him, or query coworkers about their personal experiences with Mr. T for useful tips on what motivates him to save elephants. Maybe he lived in Africa for ten years. Maybe he’s memorializing a friend who loved elephants. Such information gives you the chance to create a far more compelling message.

Writing to groups and strangers

Profiling someone you know is relatively easy, but you often write to groups rather than individuals, as well as to people you haven’t met and know nothing about. The same ideas covered in the preceding section apply to groups and strangers, but they demand a little more imagination on your part.

Here’s a good tactic for writing messages addressed to groups: Visualize a single individual — and/or a few key individuals — who epitomize that group. The financier Warren Buffet explained that when writing to stockholders, he imagines he’s writing to his two sisters who are intelligent, but not knowledgeable about finance. He consciously aims to be understood by them. The results are admirably clear financial messages that are well received and influential.

Like Buffet, you may be able to think of a particular person to represent a larger group. If you’ve invented a new piece of ski equipment, for example, think about a skier you know who’d be interested in your product and create a profile of that person. Or create a composite profile of several such people, drawing on what they have in common with variations. If you’re a businessperson looking to improve sales, think of your best clients and use what you know about them to create profiles of your ideal prospects.

Imagining your readers

Even when an audience is entirely new to you, you can still make good generalizations about what these people are like and even better, their needs. Suppose you’re a dentist who’s taking over a practice and writing to introduce yourself to your predecessor’s patients. Your basic goal is to maintain that clientele. You needn’t know the people to anticipate many of their probable concerns. You can assume, for example, that your news will be unwelcome because long-standing patients probably liked the old dentist and dislike change and inconvenience, just like you probably would yourself.

You can go further. Anticipate your readers’ questions. Just put yourself in their shoes. The dental patients may wonder:

• Why should I trust you, someone I don’t know?
• Will I feel an interruption in my care? Will there be a learning curve?
• Will I like you and find in you what I value in a medical practitioner — aspects such as kindness, respect for my time, attentiveness, good communication, specific skills and experience?

Plan your content to answer the questions your readers would ask and you won’t go wrong. You’ll save time, too. How many memos do you send or receive daily, asking for clarification or trying to sort out some kind of confusion? Careless communication is a huge concern for business leaders. One badly written email sent to ten people can waste many hours of collective work just to retrieve the situation. An even bigger worry is the impact of mistakes generated by poor communication. How often do we read about a disastrous accident because a company’s engineers failed to clearly describe a safety problem? Or that a manufacturer left critical information out of its handbook for a new model? On an everyday basis, minor variations on this theme occur every minute, everywhere.

Notice that in addition to being “me”-centered, nearly all the questions asked by the dental patients are emotional in nature rather than factual. Few patients are likely to ask about a new doctor’s training and knowledge. They take that for granted. They’re more concerned with the kind of person the dentist is and how they’ll be treated.

This somewhat counterintuitive truth applies to many situations. Good salespeople don’t pitch their experience — they pitch their ability to make the customer’s life better. Notice also that the questions would be essentially the same for a new accountant, a copywriter or any other service provider. People in general can’t very well assess a provider’s skills, since they lack the specialized knowledge. Today you can check online reviews — but notice even there, many of the comments relate to personality and quality of interaction rather than “hard” skills.

When writing, you may need to build a somewhat indirect response to some of the questions you anticipate from readers. Writing something like “I’m a really nice person” to the dental patients is unlikely to convince them, but you can comfortably include statements like these in your letter:

• I will carefully review all the records so I am personally knowledgeable about your history when we meet.
• My staff and I pledge to keep your waiting time to a minimum.
• We use all the latest techniques to make your visits comfortable and pain-free.
• I look forward to meeting you in person and getting to know you.
• I’m part of your community and participate in its good causes such as …

Apply this audience analysis strategy to job applications, business proposals, online media and other important materials. Ask yourself, whom do I want to reach? Is the person a human resources executive? A CEO? A prospective customer for my product or service? Then jot down a profile covering what that person is probably like and what their concerns and questions may be.

Everyone has a problem to solve. What’s your reader’s problem? The HR executive basically must fill open jobs in ways that satisfy other people. The CEO can pretty well be counted on to have one eye on the bottom line and the other on the big picture — that’s the CEO’s role. If you’re pitching a product, base a prospective customer profile on the person for whom you’re producing that product.

Connecting instantly with your reader

Only in rare cases do you have the luxury these days of building up to a grand conclusion, one step at a time. Your audience simply won’t stick around.

The opening paragraph of anything you write must instantly hook your readers. The best way to do this is to link directly to their central interests and concerns within the framework of your purpose.

Suppose you’re informing the staff that the office will be closed on Tuesday to install new air conditioning. You can write:

• Subject: About next Tuesday
• Dear Staff:
• As you know, the company is always interested in your comfort and well-being. As part of our company improvement plan this past year, we’ve installed improved lighting in the hallways, and in response to your request that we …

Stop! No one is reading this! Instead, try this:

• Subject: Office closed Tuesday
• We’re installing new air conditioning! Tuesday is the day, so we’re giving you a holiday.
• I’m happy the company is able to respond to your number one request on the staff survey and hope you are, too.

One of the best ways to hook readers is also the simplest: Get to the point. The technique applies even to long documents. Start with the bottom line, such as the result you achieved, the strategy you recommend or the action you want. In a report or proposal, the executive summary is often the way to do that, but note that even this micro version of your full message needs to lead off with your most important point.

Notice in the preceding example that the subject line of the email is part of the lead and planned to hook readers as much as the first paragraph of the actual message. Chapter 6 has more ideas of ways to optimize your email communication.

Focusing on what’s-in-it-for-me

In marketers’ terms, the acronym is WIIFM (what’s-in-it-for-me), meaning the audience. The air-conditioning email in the preceding section captures readers by telling them first that they have a day off, then follows up by saying that they’re getting something they wanted. Figuring out what’s going to engage your readers often takes a bit of thought.

To make people care, you must first be able to answer the question yourself. Why should they care? Then put your answer right in the lead or even the headline.

If you’re selling a product or service, for example, zero in on the problem it solves. Rather than your press release headline saying,

New Widget Model to Debut at Expo Magnus on Thursday

Try:

Widget 175F Day-to-Night VideoCam Ends Small-Shop Pilfering

If you’re raising money for a cause, you may be tempted to write a letter to previous donors that begins like many you probably receive:

For 25 years, Freedom’s Path has helped incarcerated women transition to the outside world by providing job training, counseling and support services. Your donations have been essential to equipping young transgressors to …

This sounds worthy but yawn-inducing. Would you respond better to a letter that opens more like this?

• 19-year-old Jenny Y. was holding back tears. “Sure, I’ll get out in six months, but so what? Where’s my life? No family. No high school diploma. What else can I do than go back with the friends who got me here. I don’t want to. But what’s my choice?”
• We gave Jenny a choice and for the first time in her life, Jenny saw a break. We picked her for the Second Chance Program and gave her a new start …
• We want to help more Jennys. And with your help we can …

The second version works better not just because it’s more concrete, but because it takes into account two factors that you can expect all recipients probably share: (1) a concern for disadvantaged young people, and (2) a need to be reassured that their donations are well used.

Persuading with benefits, not features

People care about what a product or service can do for them, not what it is:

• Features describe characteristics: a car having a 200-mph engine; an energy drink containing 500 units of caffeine; a hotel room furnished with priceless antiques.
• Benefits are what features give us: the feeling that you can be the fastest animal on earth (given an open highway without radar traps); the ability to stay up for 56 hours to make up all the work you neglected; the experience of high luxury for the price of a hotel room, at least briefly.

Benefits have more to do with feelings and experiences than actual data. Marketers have long understood the power of benefits, but psychologists now confirm that most buying decisions are made emotionally rather than logically. You choose a car that speaks to your personality instead of the one with the best technical specs, and then you try to justify your decision on rational grounds. You buy a dress that makes you feel beautiful, not because the seams are cleverly designed.

The lesson for business writing is clear: People care about messages that are based on what really matters to them. Don’t get lost in technical detail. Focus on the impact of an event, idea or product. You can cover the specs, but keep them contained in a separate section or as backup material. Approach information the way most newspapers have always done (and now do online as well). Put what’s most interesting or compelling up front and then include the details in the back (or link to them) for readers who want more.

Finding the concrete, limiting the abstract

The Freedom’s Path example in the previous section demonstrates that focusing on a single individual delivers a more effective message. One concrete example is almost always better than reams of high-flown prose and empty adjectives. Make things real with techniques like these:

• Tell stories and anecdotes. They must embody the idea you want to communicate, the nature of your organization or your own value. An early television show about New York City used a slogan along the lines, “Eight million people, eight million stories.” A good story is always there, lurking, even in what may seem mundane or ordinary. But finding it can take some thinking and active looking.
• Use specific examples. Tell customers how your product was used or how your service helped solve a problem. Give them strong case studies of implementations that worked. Inside a company, tell change-resistant staff members how another department saves three hours by using the new ordering process, or how a shift in benefits can cut their out-of-pocket healthcare costs by 14 percent. And if you want people to use a new system, give them clear guidelines, perhaps a step-by-step process to follow.
• Use visuals to explain and break up the words. Readers who need to be captured and engaged generally shy away from uninterrupted type. Plenty of studies show that people are much more drawn to read material like blogs, articles and social posts when there is a strong visual element. Look for ways to graphically present a trend, a change, a plan, a concept or an example. Incorporate photographs, illustrations, charts, graphs and video to suit your purpose. When you must deliver your message primarily in words, use graphic techniques like headlines, subheads, bullets, typeface variations and icons — like this book!
• Give readers a vision. Good leaders know that a vision is essential, whether they’re running companies or running for public office. You’re usually best off framing your important messages in big-picture terms that make people believe the future will be better in some way. Don’t make empty promises; instead, look for the broadest implications of what you want to communicate and use details to back up that central concept and make it more real. Will your product or service save readers time or money? Make them healthier or more attractive? Will pitching in on block cleanup day make the community better and friendlier? Those are bottom-line messages for everyone. Framing a complicated document within a broad vision also makes it more organized and more memorable.
• Eliminate meaningless hyperbole. What’s the point of saying something such as, “This is the most far-reaching, innovative, ground-breaking piece of industrial design ever conceived”? Yet business writing is jampacked with empty, boring claims.

Today’s audiences come to everything you write already jaded, skeptical and impatient. If you’re a service provider and describe what you do in words that can belong to anyone, in any profession, you fail. If you depend on a website and it takes viewers 20 seconds to figure out what you’re selling or how to make a purchase, you lose. If you’re sending out a press release that buries what’s interesting or important, you’re invisible. The antidote: Know your point and make it fast!

Go for the evidence! Tell your audience in real terms what your idea, plan or product accomplishes in ways they care about. Show them

• How the product or event improve the lives of people like themselves
• How the nonprofit is helping people, with track record proof
• How the service solves problems
• How you personally helped your employer make more money or become more efficient

Proof comes in many forms: images, statistics, data, ranking, testimonials, surveys, awards, promotions, case histories, biographies, social media followers and likes, and video and audio clips. Figure out how to track success and prove it. You end up with first-rate material to use in all your communication.

Sound positive, never negative

Who likes to receive angry or depressing messages from colleagues and coworkers? People naturally prefer being around positive, dynamic, enthusiastic, good-natured people, and they prefer receiving messages with the same qualities. Resolve not to complain, quibble or criticize in writing. People are much more inclined to give you what you want when you’re positive — and they see you as a problem-solver rather than a problem-generator.

I’m not assuming that if you feel angry, impatient or resentful, those feelings aren’t well-grounded. But displaying them rarely helps your cause. Nobody likes to get negative, whiny, nasty messages that put them on the defensive or make them feel under attack.

Suppose you’ve asked the purchasing department to buy a table for your office and were denied without explanation. You could write to both your boss and the head of purchasing a note such as the following:

Hal, Jeanne: I just can’t believe how indifferent and ignorant purchasing is to my work and what I need to do it. I’m now an Associate Manager responsible for a three-person team and regular meetings are essential to my …

Put yourself in the recipients’ places to see how bad the impact of such a message can be — for you. At the least, you’re creating unnecessary problems, and at worst, perhaps permanent bad feelings. Why not write (and just to the purchasing officer) this, instead:

Hi, Hal. Do you have a minute to talk about my request for a small conference table? I was surprised to find that it was denied and want to share why it’s important to my work.

Bottom line: Never send a message when you feel angry, unfairly treated, exhausted or just plain “down.” You’ve probably found that showing emotion in the workplace rarely gives you an advantage, usually the opposite. Tone conveys feelings, and if you’re not in control of your emotions when you write, tone betrays you.

Never vent in writing to anyone but yourself! Words written in anger are remembered forever, and messages that feel dejected undermine the goal of communicating your best self. Avoid sounding critical or resentful or tearful, too. It undermines your professionalism.

Always, always maintain a respectful tone. Even if you must write a critical message — for example, a performance review of a subordinate who needs improvement — try for a positive and upbeat spirit in both content and style. This doesn’t mean sacrificing honesty. Remembering your goal always helps: In critiquing the subordinate, you gain nothing but negatives by making your coworker feel upset and angry and hopeless. Your goal is to develop a better contributor to your own accomplishments.

To keep yourself on the upbeat track, do not send the email or report or whatever when you’re in the grip of emotion. Give yourself time to recover your grip — overnight if possible. If you must write a mean-minded message, by all means do it — it’s a great way to detox yourself. Just be careful not to send it. A good way is to leave off the person’s email address in the To: field.

Here’s a quick way to redirect your feelings on the spot: Smile when you say it. People whose job is answering the phone are told by customer service trainers to smile before picking up the call. This physical act affects your throat and vocal cords and your tone of voice. You sound friendly and cheerful and may help the person on the other end of the phone feel that way, too.

Try smiling before you write — it will at least help you to be conscious of your own mood and how easily it can transfer to your messages and documents.

Align tone with the occasion, relationship and culture

Pause before writing and think about the nature of the message. Obviously if you’re communicating bad news, you don’t want to sound chipper and cheery. Always think of your larger audience, too. If the company made more money last month because it eliminated a department, best not to treat the new profits as a triumph. Current staff members probably aren’t happy about losing colleagues and are worried about their own jobs. On the other hand, if you’re communicating about a staff holiday party, sounding gloomy and bored doesn’t generate high hopes for a good time. The same is true if you’re offering an opportunity or assigning a nuisance job: Find the enticing side.

Just as in face-to-face situations, the moods embedded in your writing are contagious. If you want an enthusiastic response, write with enthusiasm. If you want people to welcome a change you’re announcing, sound positive and confident, not fearful or peevish and resentful, even if you don’t personally agree with the change. Strive always to write with energy, because no one will believe in what you say unless you do. I cover the technical side of energetic writing in Chapter 3.

Make conscious decisions about how formal to sound. After you work in an organization for a while, you typically absorb its culture without really noticing. In fact, most people don’t realize their organizations have a culture until they run into problems when introducing change or a high-level hire. If you’re new to the place, observe how things work so you can avoid booby-trapping yourself. Scan through files of correspondence, email, reports, as well as websites and online material. Analyze what your colleagues feel is appropriate in content and in writing style. What communication media are used? How formal is the tone? Are people using emoji or other creative tools? Adopt the guidelines you see enacted or differ with caution. Ask friendly coworkers for advice.

Every passing year seems to decrease the formality of business communication. Just as in choosing what to wear to work, people are dressing down their writing. This less formal style can come across as friendlier, simpler and more direct than in earlier years — and should. But business informal doesn’t mean you should address an executive or board member casually, use abbreviations or emoji your reader may not like or might misinterpret or fail to edit and proofread every message. Those are gaffes much like wearing torn jeans to a client meeting in many industries.

And you want to be especially careful if you’re writing to someone in another country, even an English-speaking one. Most countries still prefer a more formal form of communication than American business English.

Writing as your authentic self

We write who we are, whether we intend to or not. Authentic means being a straightforward, unpretentious, honest, trustworthy person — and writer. It doesn’t mean trying for a specific writing style. Clarity is always the goalpost. This absolutely holds true even for materials written to impress. A proposal, marketing brochure or request for funding gains nothing by looking or sounding pompous and weighty.

Never try to impress anyone with how educated and literate you are. Studies show that in reality people believe that those who write clearly and use simple words are smarter than those whose writing abounds in fancy phrases and complicated sentences.

Being authentic, in person and in writing, means being yourself, right along with practicing empathy. The writing process I show you does not mean you should constantly try to give other people what they want by anticipating what you think they expect. Studies have shown that if you interview for jobs by trying to cater to what the interviewers presumably want, you muff the chance to show personal qualities they value and come across as vague and inauthentic.

In writing too, your goal is to create a genuine connection. The mindset that helps you do that is taking the trouble to see through another person’s eyes. Taking another’s perspective is your best key to creating relationships in all spheres of your life. This book gives you the tools to do that: a systematic way of thinking to remind yourself that it’s not all about you. So write — and interact in person — with empathy. You will be your authentic best self when doing this.

Showing active caring and respect

Never underestimate or patronize your audience, regardless of educational level, position or apparent accomplishment. People are quite sensitive to such attitudes and react adversely, often without knowing why or telling you. In all work and business situations, take the trouble to actively demonstrate respect for your reader. Specifically:

• Address people politely and use their names.
• Close with courtesy and friendliness.
• Write carefully and proofread thoroughly; many people find poorly written messages insulting.
• Avoid acronyms, jargon, emoji and abbreviations that may be unfamiliar or unwelcome to some readers.
• Never be abrupt or rude or demanding or critical.
• Take the trouble to consider cultural differences.
• Accord with individuals’ requests to address them with specific pronouns they have asked you to use.

Apply these guidelines whether you’re writing to a superior, a subordinate or peer. You don’t need to be obsequious to an executive higher up the chain than you are (in most cases), though often you should be more formal. Nor should you condescend to those lower down. Consider, for example, how best to assign a last-minute task to someone who reports to you. You could say,

Terry, I need you to research consultants who specialize in cultural change and send me 10 names tomorrow before 1 p.m. Thnx.

Or:

Terry, I need your help. The CEO called a surprise meeting for tomorrow afternoon to discuss ideas for making some organizational changes. I’d like to be ready to identify some consultants we might call on. Can you do the groundwork by morning and come up with 10 possible specialists by 1 p.m.? I’ll appreciate it. —Joe

Either way, Terry may not be thrilled at how his evening looks, but treating him respectfully and explaining why you’re giving him this overtime assignment accomplishes a lot: He’ll be more motivated, more enthusiastic, more interested in doing a good job and happier to be part of your team. At the cost of writing a few more sentences, you improve your subordinate’s attitude and perhaps even his long-range performance.

Explaining how assignments fit into the bigger picture and why they matter is especially inspiring to younger generations. But whatever their age, people who report to you are doing your work and helping you perform better and look good. Why not make them feel as important as they are, in ways that matter to them? Telling people why you want something works magic.

Personalizing what you write

In many countries, business email and letters that get right down to business seem cold, abrupt and unsympathetic. Japanese writers and readers, for example, prefer to begin with the kind of polite comments you tend to make when meeting someone in person: “How have you been?” “Is your family well?” “Isn’t it cold for October?” Such comments or questions may carry no real substance, but they serve an important purpose. They personalize the interaction to better set the stage for a business conversation.

In any culture, creating a sense of caring or at least interest in the other person gives you a much better context within which to transact business. If you’ve thought about your audience when planning what to write (see “Defining your audience” earlier in this chapter), you can easily come up with simple but effective personalizing phrases to frame your message.

You can always fall back on the old reliables: weather and general health inquiries. If communication continues, you can move the good feelings along by asking whether the vacation mentioned earlier worked out well, or ask how the conference went — whatever clues you can follow up on without becoming inappropriate or intrusive. The idea works when you address groups, too: You can, for example, begin, “I hope you all weathered the snowstorm okay.”

Some techniques you can use to make your writing feel warm are useful, but they may not translate between different cultures. For example, salutations like Hi, John set a less formal tone than Dear John. Starting with just the recipient’s name — John — is informal to the point of assuming a relationship already exists. But both ways may not be appropriate if you’re writing to someone in a more formal country than your own. A formal address, such as Mr. Charles, Ms. Brown, Dr. Jones, General Frank, may be called for. In many cultures, if you overlook this formality and other signs of respect, you can lose points before you even begin. Or not even get the chance to begin.

Framing messages with “you” not “I”

Embrace this basic concept: People care infinitely more about themselves, their problems and what they want than they do about you. This simple-sounding premise has important implications for business communication — actually, all human communication.

Suppose you’re a software developer and your company has come up with a new template for creating a home page. Your first thought for an announcement on your website might be:

We’ve created an amazing new home page template better than anyone ever imagined was possible.

Or you could say:

Our great new Template X helps people build beautiful home pages with the least effort ever.

The second example is better because it’s less abstract and it makes the product’s purpose clear. But see if you find this version better yet:

Want a faster way to create a knock-out home page in half the time, with resources you already own? Here it is: Template X.

When you look for ways to use the word you more, even implicitly (the first sentence of the last pitch omits the “you”), and correspondingly decrease the use of I and we, you put yourself on the reader’s wavelength. In the case of the new template, your readers care about how the product can help them, not that you’re proud of achieving it.

The principle works for everyday email, letters and online communication, too. For example, when you receive a customer complaint, instead of saying,

We have received your complaint about …

You’re better off writing:

Your letter explaining your disappointment with our product has been received …

Or, much better:

Thank you for writing to us about your recent problem with …

Coming up with a “you frame” can be challenging. It may draw you into convoluted or passive-sounding language, such as, “Your unusual experience with our tree-pruning service has come to our attention.” Ordinarily I recommend a direct statement (like, “We hear you’ve had an unusual experience with …”), but in customer service situations and others where you need to instantly relate to your reader, figuring out a way to start with “you” can be worth the effort and a brief dip into passive voice.

In every situation, genuinely consider your reader’s viewpoint, sensitivities and needs. Think about how the message you’re communicating affects that person or group. Anticipate questions and build in the answers. Write within this framework and you will guide yourself to create successful messages and documents.

Before sending a message, always ask yourself: How will it make this person feel? It’s easy to know — consider how you would feel if you were on the receiving end. If the answer is “not so good,” take the time to remedy your material. When you care, you do the work, and it shows. And you succeed.

In Chapters 3, 4 and 5, I give you a full set of techniques to draw on for delivering your message clearly and powerfully. Discover how to use the tools of writing — words, sentences and structure — to say what you mean in a way most likely to earn respect, support and agreement.