How to Get Read When You Can’t Write
ORGANIZATION AND SUCCINCTNESS ARE KEYS TO GETTING THE WORDS OUT
It's now easier than ever to be an inept writer and still get your point across
The sentence as we know it isn't quite dead, but readers' dwindling attention spans mean they require fewer words. In addition, word processing software has made it easy to use visual cues to compensate for any grammatical deficiencies.
You've probably noticed that poor writers tend to substitute quantity for quality because they never got beyond those 500-word essay days in school. They use padded phrases and repeat their points, thinking the key to success is to hit a certain word count. If you can't write, let this be your Golden Rule: Less is more.
Get Organized
Before you type the first word of any business letter, presentation, memo, or e-mail, devise a plan of attack. It doesn't have to be elaborate, so forget about numbered outlines and stacks of index cards. Instead, make a simple list of each point you want to make. Next, assign each point a numerical rank. No.1 should be your main point.
The concept is called building an "inverted pyramid." Visualize a pyramid with its tip on the ground and its wide base on top. When you present points in this format, if readers only skim your first few lines/they'll get the brunt of your message.
Too many business writers make the mistake of trying to build to a big finish by starting with insignificant details. This compounds the writing problem because little points are hard to present since there's not much meat to them. Unless your name is Agatha Christie and there's a guilty butler in your report, using a trail of smelly little red herrings to lure the reader along is likely to earn your work a quick trip to the round file.
Give Your Subject Lines a Hook
Have you ever dug through your electronic inbox looking for a certain email but came up empty because all the subject lines said "Report" or "Here's an Interesting Article"?
Think of the subject line as your title or headline. You should have one on every document, whether it's paper or electronic. It doesn't have to be clever, but it should be informative. Pretend it's the tab of the file folder you'll be hunting for in five years.
"Meeting" is a subject line that doesn't tell anyone anything, but "2005 Capital Expenditures Budget Sept. 1 Meeting" says it all.
Think Short
This goes against everything you were taught in school when your English teacher waxed poetic on the infinite nuances of sentence structure, but in business writing, shorter is always better. Even if the message is complicated, use short sentences that contain one thought. Here's a rule of thumb: If a sentence contains three or more punctuation marks, excluding the period, you can probably break it into simpler sentences.
Use Subheadings
Going back to school days, when most of our bad writing habits were hammered into us, do you remember what you did when textbooks were handed out? You looked for pictures, white space, and large print. As adults, we instinctively do the same with everything we read.
Subheadings are the poor writer's best friend because they perform two vital functions. They make white space, and they create seamless transitions between topics.
Like subject lines, good subheadings are meaningful. Instead of using gratuitous, meaningless subheadings like "Introduction," "Summary," and "Conclusion," pull a few pertinent words from the text to create a mini-summary of the topic, such as "Benefits of Software Upgrades." The more subheads you use, the less writing you have to do because each new idea doesn't need a narrative introduction.
Write the Way You Talk
Any writing takes an immediate nosedive when the author assumes a formal or business-like persona. When you write the way people talk, omitting the obvious "uhs," "you knows," and "I means," your style becomes so transparent that readers don't even think about it. When your message comes through as effortlessly as conversation, no one feels as if his intelligence has been insulted because you didn't use big words. So, it's fine to leave the fancy vocabulary in the dictionary.
Mark Twain made the point when he wrote, "I never write 'metropolis' for seven cents because I can get the same price for 'city.' "
Never try to write like an attorney unless you are an attorney and can't help yourself. If you need to get something signed, don't ask your reader to "execute" it. Don't refer to people as "parties." Never call yourself "the undersigned."
Rely on industry jargon and buzzwords as little as possible. When you think about it, they're a second language. How many people do you know who are bilingual? When you must use the vocabulary of your trade, always spell out abbreviations and acronyms the first time they appear, just to be on the safe side.
Forget about elegant variation. Having a dozen ways to say the same thing is just a license to confuse people. If you send an e-mail about your upcoming presentation and refer to it as a "speech, lecture, talk, workshop, and get-together" just to make it sound more interesting than it really is, readers will fear you're plotting a whole series of dull diatribes.
When writing technical material, it's important to call a shovel a shovel every time. If you've ever assembled something from a kit and found that no two pieces mentioned in the instructions had the same name from one step to the next, you'll understand why.
Make Liberal Use of Lists
Like subheadings, lists effortlessly conceal a multitude of writing deficiencies. Even better, most readers actually prefer lists to long narrative paragraphs. Whenever you have a sentence containing three or more items, present them as a list.
This writing seminar will give you the tools to: - make your writing easy to read
- tailor your message to diverse audiences
- correct problem areas.
The trick to writing lists is to keep the elements parallel. Make them all either short phrases or complete sentences, or all actions or things. Don't make this mistake:
To streamline our human resource efforts, we must: - re-evaluate our staffing needs
- document our training procedures so that new hires may become productive more quickly
- revise our performance appraisal standards
- Application form review.
Making lists of short phrases provides two additional bonuses. You don't have to think in complete sentences, and you can simplify punctuation.
To separate list items, use bullets or numbers. However, be aware that bullets and numbers aren't interchangeable or a matter of personal preference. In deciding which to use, it all boils down to whether the list must be read or followed in a certain order. If the answer is yes, then you need numbers. If order doesn't matter, use bullets.
Bullets come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but use them consistently and don't go overboard. If you're providing a checklist, you might use checkmark bullets or small squares that readers can check themselves.
Use Tables for Easy Comparisons
For side-by-side comparisons, there's nothing like a good table or spreadsheet. Never describe items paragraph by paragraph when the information will fit in a table. Once again, tables eliminate the chore of writing because you're dealing only with raw information.
When you set up a table, give a short title to each row and column. How the information is presented depends on the number of items. For example, if you have 10 items with three characteristics each to compare, your table should have 10 rows with three columns.
Pictures Are Still Worth a Thousand Words
Former presidential candidate Ross Perot's graphs seemed so refreshing at the beginning of the 1992 presidential campaign because no politician had ever made such an effort to be clear. Unfortunately, he didn't seem to know when to stop, and his pie charts eventually became fodder for late-night comedians. But the principle was sound. Show, don't tell. If you can make a point more easily with a picture or graph, do it.
Use Visual Tricks for Greater Readability
Judicious use of color is a great way to get noticed. In long electronic documents, you can assign colors to different levels of subheadings. If readers will print your work, make sure your colors are dark enough to show up in black and white. Blue, red, and green are usually fine for e-mail and print documents. However, you should probably reserve yellow for presentations written against a dark background.
You've also got many fonts in a wide range of sizes as well as typographical gimmicks like shadow, outline, emboss, engrave, small caps, bold, italics, and underline. Remember that less is more unless you've got formal training in graphic design.
The key to all good business writing is to use as few—short—words as possible. Computers can also help you add pizzazz. By using every trick at your disposal, you can write less but say more.
Karen Wormed is a freelance business writer based in Midlothian, VA. She can be reached at Kew Publications, Kewpubs@aol.com or 804/379-8503.