Writing to be understood

Clarity and simplicity go hand in hand. It means your messages communicate what you intend with no room for misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Your reason for writing, and what you want the reader to do as a result of reading the message, are equally clear. This requires using:

• Words your reader already knows and whose meanings are agreed upon — no forcing readers to look up words; no trying to impress
• Sentences centered on simple, active verbs in the present tense when possible (for example, “Jane wrote the report” rather than “the report has been written by Jane”)
• A sentence structure that leads readers though the message and motivates them to keep going
• Well-organized, logical, on-point, just-enough content without anything unnecessary or distracting
• Clear connections between sentences, paragraphs and ultimately ideas, so your statement is cohesive
• Correct spelling and basic grammar

Writing with the preceding characteristics is transparent — nothing stands in the way of the reader absorbing your information, ideas and requests. Good business writing for most purposes doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s like a good makeup job. People don’t want to hear, “Great cosmetology!” They much prefer, “You look beautiful.” Similarly, you want your audience to admire your thinking, not the way you phrased it.

One result of meeting these criteria is that people can move through your material quickly. This is good! A fast read is your best shot at pulling people into your message and keeping them from straying off because they’re bored. These days we are all so overwhelmed and impatient that we often don’t bother to invest time in deciphering a message’s meaning. We just stop reading.

Creating an easy reading experience is hard on the writer. Just like a simple dress or suit is often more expensive than a fussy one, a message that seems simple is a bigger investment, but in terms of thought. When you write well, you do all the readers’ work for them. They don’t need to figure out anything because you’ve already done every bit of it. Leave out information or connections and they will leap the gap in any way they choose. So take the trouble to be unambiguous, complete and concise, because that’s how you win what you want.

All these elements of good writing are covered in this chapter and the next two.

Applying readability guidelines

Guidelines for business writing are not theoretical. They’re practical, and moreover, supported by research studies on how people respond to the written word. Fortunately, you don’t have to read the research. Most word-processing programs and several websites have already digested all the data and offer easy-to-use tools to help you quickly gauge the readability of your writing.

More and more tools to help with grammar and language become available daily, but using a readability index remains the best tool I know to objectively evaluate your writing as you develop material or after drafting. Rather than rewriting a message for you — which robots don’t do very well — it provides the clues you need to recognize weaknesses and fix them.

Several readability indexes are available (see the sidebar “Readability research: What it tells us” later in this chapter). In this section, I focus on the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Index because it’s the one Microsoft Word uses. It predicts the percentage of people likely to understand a piece of writing and assigns it a grade level of reading comprehension. The grade-level scores are based on average reading ability of students in the U.S. public school system. The algorithm for a readability index is primarily based on the length of words, sentences and paragraphs.

Called “Readability Statistics,” Microsoft Word’s version also shows you the percentage of passive sentences in a selection, which is a good indicator of flabby verbs, indirect sentence structure and cut-worthy phrases.

Finding the right rhythm

You may wonder whether writing based on short simple sentences produces choppy and boring material reminiscent of a grade school textbook. Aiming for clear and simple definitely should not mean dull reading.

Become aware of rhythm in what you read and what you write, and you will improve your writing dramatically. Like all language, English was used to communicate orally about 100,000 years before writing was invented, so sound and rhythm patterns are critical to how written forms as well as spoken ones are received.

Think of the worst public speakers you know. They probably present in a series of long, complex sentences in an even tone that quickly numbs the ear. Good speakers, by contrast, hold your attention by varying sentence length, inflection and intonation. As a writer, you want to do the same.

In everything you write, aim to build in a natural cadence. Rhythm is one of the main tools for cajoling people to stay with you and find what you write interesting. Just begin each sentence differently from the previous one and try alternating short, plain sentences with longer ones that have two or three clauses, usually marked by commas. Like good public speakers, you can also inject short punchy words and phrases, but dole them out carefully.

Achieving a conversational tone

New business writers are often told to adopt a “conversational” tone, but what does that actually mean?

Business correspondence written during the nineteenth century, and even most of the twentieth, seems slow, formal and ponderous when you read it now. Today’s communication needs to move as fast as our lives, and we want it to feel natural.

Conversational tone is something of an illusion, however. You don’t really write the way you talk, and you shouldn’t. But you can echo natural speech in various ways to more effectively engage your audience.

Rhythm, discussed in the preceding section, is a basic technique that gives your copy forward momentum and promotes a conversational feeling. Additional techniques to achieve conversational tone include:

• Infuse messages with warmth. Think of the person as an individual before you write and content that’s appropriate to the relationship and subject will come to you. The tone will be right.
• Choose short simple words. Rely on the versions you use to talk to someone, rather than the sophisticated ones you use to try and impress. See “Choosing reader-friendly words” later in this chapter for examples.
• Use contractions as you do in speech. Go more often with “can’t” rather than “cannot,” “I’m” rather than “I am.”
• Minimize the use of inactive forms. Carefully evaluate every use of the “to be” verbs — is, was, will be, are and so on — to determine if you can use active, interesting verbs instead.
• Take selective liberties with grammatical correctness. Starting a sentence with “and” or “but” or “or” is okay, for example, but avoid mismatching your nouns and pronouns. However, this once-simple rule is more complicated today — Chapter 5 gives you updated guidelines.
• Adopt an interactive spirit. As online media embodies, one-way, top-down communication is “so yesterday.” Find ways in all your writing to invite active interest and input from your reader. Today’s readers, especially younger ones, want to be part of the experience, not passive recipients of someone else’s ideas. Many online techniques have been adapted to traditional media, and you want to incorporate them as appropriate.

If you ignore the preceding guidelines — and want to look hopelessly outdated — you can write a long-winded and lifeless message like the following:

• Dear Elaine:
• I regret to inform you that the deadline for the Blue Jay proposal has been advanced to an earlier point in time, namely, August 14. Will this unexpected eventuality present insurmountable difficulties to your department? Please advise and inform my office of your potential availability at 3 p.m. on the 2nd to discuss. —Carrie

Yawn — and also a bit confusing. Or you can write a clear, quick, crisp version like this:

Elaine, I’m sorry to say the Blue Jay deadline has been moved up to August 14. Bummer, I know. What problems does this create? Let’s talk. Thursday at 3? —Carrie

Although the second example feels casual and conversational, these aren’t the actual words Carrie would say to Elaine in a real phone conversation. This exchange is more likely:

Hi. How are you? Listen, we got a problem. The Blue Jay deadline — would you believe — it’s now August 14th. Yeah, I know, total bummer. We gotta talk about this. How’s Thursday at 3?

A chat message may read closer to the conversational mode because it is acceptably spontaneous. But for the same reason, chat doesn’t work well for more “serious” matters that demand thoughtful exchange or detail — even informal networks find email better in such cases.

Online copy often works best when it carries the conversational illusion to an extreme. Pay attention to the jazzy, spontaneous-style copy on websites you love. The words may read like they sprang ready-made out of some genie’s lamp, but more than likely they were produced by a team of copywriters agonizing over every word for weeks or months or years. Spontaneous-reading copy doesn’t come easy: It’s hard work. Some people — frequent bloggers, for example — are good at writing conversationally because they practice this skill consciously.

Similarly, do you imagine that comedians — or rap artists — perform with total spontaneity? Not so much. At the least, they draw on a repertoire of ideas developed over time and may carefully practice an off-the-cuff tone. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld shared in a video interview that one signature joke he uses in standup gigs took him three years to perfect. Preparation is critical for non-funny events as well — politicians and CEOs (or their support people) systematically anticipate all possible questions and practice answering them in advance.

Relying on everyday wording

The short everyday words you use in ordinary speech are your basic stock for business writing. They’re clear, practical, direct and concrete. They’re also powerful enough to express your deepest and widest thoughts. They’re the words that reach people emotionally, too, because they stand for the most basic and tangible things people care about and need to communicate about. “Home” is a whole different story than “residence”; “quit” carries a lot more overtones than “resign.” Does “dumped” carry more feeling than “rejected”?

Make a list of basic one- and two-syllable words and almost certainly, they come from the oldest part of the English language, Anglo-Saxon. Most words with three or more syllables were grafted onto this basic stock by historical invaders: the French-speaking Normans and the Latin-speaking Romans for the most part, both of whom aspired to higher levels of cultural refinement than the Britons.

If you were raised in an English-speaking home, you learned Anglo-Saxon words during earliest childhood and acquired the ones with “foreign” influences later in your education. Scan these previous two paragraphs and you know immediately which words came from which culture set.

For many reasons, then, readers are programmed to respond best to simple, short, low-profile English words. They trigger feelings of trust (an Anglo-Saxon word) and credibility (from the French). Obviously, I don’t choose to write entirely with one-syllable words. Variety is the key — just as with sentences. English’s history gives you a remarkable array of words when you want to be precise or produce certain feelings. Even in business English, a sprinkling of longer words contributes to a good pace and can make what you say more specific and interesting. But don’t forget your basic word stock.

If you’re writing to a non-native English-speaking audience, you have even more reason to write with one- and two-syllable words. People master the same basic words first when learning a new language, no matter what their original tongue, so all new English-speakers understand them. You know this if you’ve ever had a conversation in with someone whose native language is not English, in a language foreign to both of you. For example, if you converse with a Russian speaker who studied two years of French like you did, you can communicate quite well with each other.

In many workplaces today, you need to communicate with culturally diverse audiences all the time as well as with people with different educational levels. Make simple, straightforward language the general rule.

This principle holds for long documents like reports and proposals as much as for emails. They should never read pretentiously no matter how big a job you’re pitching and no matter how impressive the company. And short word guidelines are also important for online writing such as for websites and blogs. When we read onscreen, we have even less patience with multi-syllable, sophisticated words. Reading (and writing) on smartphones and other small devices usually makes short words the only practical choice.

Choosing reader-friendly words

Using short, easy words may seem like common sense, so why do you see so much business messaging with all those long, highly educated words in dense sentences? I have no idea. If everyone wrote the way we all prefer to read, I’m sure we’d have a more collegial, efficient and productive world.

Consciously develop your awareness of short-word options. Clearer writing gives you better results. In most circumstances, opt for the first and friendlier word in the following pairs.

I don’t mean that the longer words are bad — in fact, they can often be the better choice. But generally, be sure you have a reason for going long.

Make up your own list of words to simplify by observing your writing. Identify the three or more syllable words you use often, think about shorter alternatives and write them down as in the preceding list. An online thesaurus can help. Once you are conscious of your options, you will make better choices in all your writing.

Focusing on the real and concrete

Concrete nouns are words that denote something tangible: a person or any number of actual things, such as dog, nose, dirt, doctor, house, boat, balloon, computer, egg, tree, chair and so on. They are objects that exist in real space. You can experience them with your senses — touch, see, hear, smell or taste them.

Abstract nouns typically represent ideas and concepts. They may denote a situation, condition, quality or experience, such as catastrophe, freedom, efficiency, happiness, knowledge, mystery, fairness, observation, sadness, analysis, research, love, democracy and countless more.

When you use concrete nouns in your writing, readers bring their sensory associations to your words, and this lends reality to your thoughts. Moreover, you can expect most people to take the same meaning from them. This isn’t true of abstract words. Two people are unlikely to argue about what a flag is, but they may well disagree on what exactly “democracy” or “happiness” means.

When you build your writing on a lot of abstract nouns, you are generalizing. Even when you’re writing an opinion or philosophical piece, too much abstraction doesn’t fire the imagination. A lot of business writing strikes readers as dull and uninspiring for this reason.

Suppose at a pivotal point of World War II Winston Churchill had written in the manner of many modern business executives:

We’re operationalizing this initiative to proceed as effectively, efficiently and proactively as possible in alignment with our responsibilities to existing population centers and our intention to develop a transformative future for mankind. We’ll employ cost-effective, cutting-edge technologies and exercise the highest level of commitment, whatever the obstacles that materialize in various geographic situations.

Instead he wrote and said:

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Which statement engages the senses and therefore the heart, even three-quarters of a century after this particular cause was won? Which carries more conviction? Granted, Churchill was writing a speech, but the statement also works amazingly when read.

While you probably won’t be called on to rouse your countrymen as Churchill was, writing in a concrete way pays off for you, too. It brings your writing alive. Aim to get down to earth in what you say and how you say it.

Notice how many words of the mock business-writing piece contain three or more syllables. Churchill’s piece uses only three. And running both passages through readability checks (see the previous section, “Applying readability guidelines”) predicts at least a 12th-grade reading level to understand the business-speak with only 2 percent of readers understanding it. By contrast, Churchill’s lines require only a 4th-grade reading level and 91 percent of readers understand them.

You may often find yourself tempted to write convoluted, indirect, abstract prose — because it’s common to your corporate culture or your technical field or the Request for Proposal you’re responding to. Don’t do it. Remind yourself that nobody likes to read that kind of writing, even though they may write that way themselves. Take the lead in delivering lean lively messages and reap more of the positive responses you want.

Finding action verbs

Good strong verbs invigorate. Passive verbs, which involve a form of the verb “to be,” deaden language and thinking, too. Consider some dull sentences and their better alternatives:

• The whole company was alarmed by the stock market loss.
• The stock market loss alarmed the whole company.

• A decision to extend working hours was reached by the talent management office.
• The talent management office decided to extend working hours.

The first sentence in each set represents what grammarians call the passive voice: a form of the verb “to be” followed by a word ending in “-ed.” Other constructions also use non-active verbs that tell you to take a second look. One clue: sentences that rely on the phrases “there is” and “there are,” which often bury meaning. Compare the following pairs:

• There is a company rule to consider in deciding which route to follow.
• A company rule tells us which route to follow.

• There are guidelines you should use if you want to improve your writing.
• Follow the guidelines to improve your writing.

For most dull inactive verbs, the solution is the same: Find the action. Be clear about who did what and then rework the sentence to say that.

You may need to go beyond changing the verb and rethink the entire sentence so it’s simple, clear and direct. In the process, take responsibility. Passive sentences often evade it. A classic example:

Mistakes were made, people were hurt and opportunities were lost.

Who made the mistakes, hurt the people and lost the opportunities? The writer? An unidentified CEO? Mystery government officials? This kind of structure is sometimes called “the divine passive”: Some unknown or unnamable force made it happen.

To help you remember why you generally need to avoid the passive, here’s my favorite mistake. I asked a group of people to write about their personal writing problems and how they planned to work on them. One person contributed:

Many passive verbs are used by me.

Take the time to identify the passive verbs and indirect constructions in all your writing. Doing so doesn’t mean that you must always eliminate them. You may want to use the passive because no clearly definable active subject exists — or it doesn’t matter:

The award was created to recognize outstanding sales achievement.

Or you may have a surprise to disclose that leads you to use the passive for emphasis:

This year’s award was earned by the newest member of the department: Joe Mann.

Using the passive unconsciously often undermines your writing success. Substitute active verbs. They can be short and simple, such as drive, end, gain, fail, win, probe, treat, taint, speed. Or they can be longer words that offer more precise meaning, such as underline, trigger, suspend, pioneer, model, fracture, crystallize, compress, accelerate. Both word groups suggest action and movement, adding zing and urgency to your messages.

Crafting comparisons to help readers

Comparisons help your readers understand your message on deeper levels. You can use similes and metaphors, which are both analogies, to make abstract ideas more tangible and generally promote comprehension. These devices don’t need to be elaborate, long or pretentiously literary. Here are some simple comparisons:

• Poets use metaphors like painters use brushes — to paint pictures that help people see under the surface.
• Winning this award is my Oscar.
• Life: a box of chocolates.
• The average human hair is 90,000 nanometers wide, compared to the width of the new polymer strand — 10 nanometers.
• From 15,000 feet up, the world looks like a colorful quilt of peace and harmony.

Whatever device you use, effective comparisons

• Create mental images. You can give readers a different way to access — and remember — your ideas and information.
• Align things from different arenas. Using the familiar to explain the unfamiliar can be especially helpful when you introduce new information or change.
• Bring abstract concepts down to earth. Express abstract ideas in concrete language so they become more real and easier to grasp.
• Heighten the impact of everyday practical writing. Just as in well-written fiction, a great comparison in a business document engages the reader’s imagination.
• Make intriguing headlines that grab attention. A blog post caught me with the title, “How Learning to Ride a Bike is Like Working at Home.” I read it just to find out what the two things have in common.

Building in white space

To coin a comparison (see the sidebar “Making up fresh comparisons”):

Add white space to your writing for the same reason bakers add yeast to their bread — to leaven the denseness by letting in light and air.

The eye demands rest when scanning or reading. Don’t cram your words into a small tight space by decreasing the point size or squeezing the space between characters, words or lines. Densely packed text is inaccessible and unwelcoming. If you have too many words for the available space, cut them down. You’ll find many ways to do that while also heightening your impact with the techniques in Chapter 4.

Always look for opportunities to add that valuable white space to your message. Check for white space in everything you deliver. Factors that affect white space include the size of the typeface, line spacing, margin size and column width, and graphic devices such as subheads, sidebars and images.

Choosing a typeface

Type has numerous graphic aspects and effects. Following are some of the most significant, as well as easiest to adjust.

Keeping colors simple

Using color to accent a print document makes for happier eyes, but stay simple. One color, in addition to black used for the text, is probably plenty. Typically, it’s best used in a consistent way for headlines and subheads. Full color is best applied to photographs and other graphics rather than to making rainbow copy.

Even online, where you face no limit on using as many colors as you like, seeing a lot of different colors strikes people as messy and amateur these days. Designers prefer simple, clean palettes that combine a few colors at most. So should you. And avoid placing any type against a color background that makes it hard to read. This means that backgrounds should be no more than a light tint. Dropped or reversed-out type — for instance, white type on a black or dark background — can look terrific, but only in small doses, such as a caption or short sidebar. A whole page of reversed-out type, whether in print or onscreen, makes a daunting read.

If you’re working on a major document or website with a graphic designer, never allow graphic impact to trump readability and editorial clarity. To most designers, words are just part of a visual pattern. If a designer tells you the document has too many words, listen; it’s probably true and you do want the piece to look good. But “just say no” if playing second fiddle to the visual undermines your message. Graphics should strengthen, not weaken, its impact and absorbability.

Adding effective graphics

If you’ve got good images and they’re appropriate, flaunt them. Increasingly this principle is applied to short messaging as well as long documents, because so much research demonstrates the strength of visual material in drawing and holding reader attention. Visuals are beginning to dominate relatively older online media like Twitter and are the story with tools like Pinterest and Instagram, not to mention video-sharing media like YouTube and TikTok.

Evaluate the appropriateness of graphics based on your purpose. A proposal can benefit from charts and graphs to make financials and other variables clear and more easily grasped. A report may include photographs of a project under way. A blog with a fun image related to the subject is more enticing. Business materials can benefit from images of successful projects to support credibility, illustrations of something yet to be built, and visualizations of abstract ideas.

When visual effect matters — to attract readers or when you’re competing for a big contract, for example — take time to brainstorm the graphics. Good online resources for photographs, video, symbols, cartoons and more proliferate, and many are free. Better yet, create your own — smartphone photographs are now good enough even for publication. You can customize your own photos by cropping, shifting the color to change the mood and adding special effects. Your computer and even your smartphone offer the power to produce a good infographic, chart or graph.

Images not appropriate to your material annoy readers. Even with websites, research shows that contrary to popular assumption, people value the words most and are put off by images unrelated to the subject. Ready-made clip art available online is much better than it used to be. But choose carefully and customize it when you can to avoid cheapening your message in the viewer’s eye. Generally, it’s best to keep visual style consistent — all cartoons or all photographs, for example.

For websites, resist the temptation to use stock photos of people: those depictions of good-looking models talking or working carefully balanced for age, gender and ethnicity. “Real” people are more interesting and convincing even though imperfect by model standards. If your business doesn’t lend itself to showing people, exercise imagination to come up with other visual representations of what you do or what you mean.

Breaking space up with sidebars, boxes and lists

Today print media increasingly rely on graphic techniques to draw readers in with as much variety as they can devise. “Captive audiences” are few and far between! Interest must be captured, and kept, whatever the medium and message. Think about how we all scan to decide if an email, article, blog or book is worth our time and how easily our attention can be lost. Your tools for capturing and maintaining attention include good active headlines and subheads. Also pay major attention to creating:

• Abstracts, which are small compelling summaries or introductions to an article, proposal or report
• Captions to accompany photos and other images, preferably with interesting information not covered in the copy
• Interesting quotes or tidbits used as “pullouts” or “pull quotes” in the margins or inside the text
• Sidebars and boxes with additional background, sidelights or information or examples
• Bulleted or numbered lists of examples or steps
• Icons (such as the Tip and Remember icons in this book) that denote something of special interest

All these devices serve three important purposes. Along with images, they

• Break up unrelieved blocks of type that discourage the eye. Traditionally, print editors used the “dollar bill test”: If you can lay down a bill on a page and it doesn’t touch a single graphic device, add one in.
• Capture reader attention in different ways. A summary, a caption or a box may draw someone to read the whole piece, or at least some of it.
• Help to convey ideas and information more clearly and effectively. People absorb information in different ways. Taking lessons from the online world, today’s editors offer readers choices of what they want to read, where they choose to start and degree of depth they are motivated to pursue.

Good graphic thinking should be part of your writing repertoire. Do you need these devices for every email you write? Of course not. But if you’re delivering a sales pitch, they certainly provide more impact. Even many emails benefit from techniques that make what you write more clear, accessible, attractive and memorable. Simple strategies like using subheads and bullets can help get your message across. For long documents and materials whose goal is persuasion, draw on all the techniques that suit your goals, audience, nature of your message and the medium.

The next chapter introduces you to the editing stage of writing. If like most people you’ve never given much thought to this process, or it strikes fear into your heart, not to worry. Common sense can take you a long way and a batch of professional tricks does the rest. Once you discover how beautifully self-editing can strengthen your messages, I think you’ll become a believer.